


The Smollet Chronicles

by Chokopoppo



Category: Anastasia (1997), Iron Giant (1999), The Mummy (1999), Treasure Planet (2002)
Genre: Animal Death, Brotherhood, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Mythology-Appropriate Violence, Non-Graphic Violence, Platonic Relationships, The Spiderwick Chronicles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-10-15 06:06:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 60,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10551344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chokopoppo/pseuds/Chokopoppo
Summary: In his uncle's home, Jim Hawkins makes his first regrettable acquaintance with the Fae Folk. It will not - no matter how hard he tries - be his last, as well.Their world is closer than you think.





	1. The Field Guide

**Author's Note:**

> Haha, check this out! It's a close contender in the race to the bottom for the worst thing I have ever written. Also in the running is that time I wrote Benvolio/Mercutio fanfiction in high school, and the line _"As long as it covers your nipples, it's a shirt"._ Anyway, this exists for some reason, and I'll almost certainly continue writing it while ignoring all my other, better projects. Sorry, guys!
> 
> Maybe it's obvious, but this whole storyline is lifted straight from The Spiderwick Chronicles. I'll cram an entire book into each chapter, because I'm an asshole.

The house is huge - one of those old crumbling mansions like the ones back home in Montressor. It’s mostly brick, except for the wood sidings on the second floor, which are painted an unconvincing brick red. What windows aren’t boarded up are pitch black in the low evening light, like gaping holes punched through the facade. Jim slumps lower in his seat - from the back, his half-brother leans up to get a look through the windshield.

“It’s not so bad,” his mother says after a moment. “It’s…big. There’ll be lots of room to play in.” Jim rolls his eyes and hunches his shoulders up around his ears.

“I bet there’s lots of animals in the woods,” Hogarth says hopefully, “maybe uncle Rick’ll let me get a pet. My mom never does.”

She smiles fondly. Jim recognizes the indulgent look on her face as one she had once turned on him, and his chest tightens under his jacket. “Well, you certainly have enough cages,” she teases, “maybe Jim can teach you how to catch a squirrel. Come on, let’s go inside.”

The engine of the car shuts off, and Hogarth scrambles quickly out of the back and scurries up toward the porch, leaving Jim and his mother alone in the car. She opens the car door - glances at her motionless son - sighs. “Jim.” No answer. “ _Jim._ ” Silence again. She shakes her head and closes the door again. “Jim, I know you’re upset, but you can’t just shut me out like this. First you told me you didn’t want to be at home during the move. Now you’re…doing _this._ Can you please just talk to me?”

Jim sighs, shakes his head. “Mom, it’s no big deal,” he says, “I’m just tired from the drive. I just - I was just thinking - “ when he glances at his mother, her face is twisted in concern. He shifts uncomfortably, guilt dripping down his back. The stress, the exhaustion, the long nights and long hours pressing against her skin all weigh heavily on his shoulders. “It’s nothing,” he lies, “don’t worry about it. I just need a minute alone.”

If she sees the dark cloud still looming, either mother’s intuition or plain exhaustion prevents her from inquiring further. Instead, she squeezes his shoulder silently, then steps out of the car, leaving him alone. He watches her join Hogarth on the porch, watches the door open, light flooding around the figure of their uncle. Their father’s brother.

It had to be harder for his mother to be there than him, he knows. The living reminder of her husband trying to welcome her into a house she knows she doesn’t belong in. He feels for her - he feels the same way as her. But she’s not staying here all summer, and he is. _She’s_ going to Rockwell to stay with dad’s newest ex, Annie. His mom calls Annie her “close friend”, but he’s not thirteen anymore. He knows what that means.

The car is cooling around him, the lights dimming and clicking. From the house, he watches his cousin approach, and unbuckles his seatbelt so he can slouch lower yet. Because what this time of emotional turmoil really _needed_ was Dimitri O’Connell’s thick head, ruining everything.

No amount of slouching is going to save him from familial assault, though. Dimitri jerks the door open and looms over him. “Hey, space case, get out of the car.”

Jim scowls up at him. “I don’t have to listen to you. You’re not my _mom._ ”

“You’re right, I’m not,” he replies, “because your mom doesn’t believe in corporal punishment.” As if by example, he slugs Jim in the arm. Hard. Jim yelps, scrambles out to fight back. In between strikes as they spar across the yard, he takes a moment to appreciate their ever unchanging relationship.

“Hogarth!” He calls over his shoulder, struggling in a headlock, “Hogarth, jump on his back!”

“I’m a pacifist,” his brother says, more cheerfully than the situation really dictates. “I’m only out here to get my stuff.”

“Oh, right,” Jim says, struggling (unsuccessfully) to get out of his cousin’s grip, “the eight million squirrel traps.”

“For what?”

“For eight million squirrels, probably,” Jim snaps. Dimitri grunts irritably and drops him unceremoniously on the wet grass.

“No pets in the house,” he says, “I’m allergic to animals.”

“Which ones?” Hogarth asks, a cage in either hand.

“All of them.”

Hogarth considers this, shrugs, and carries his cages inside. Jim spits dirt out of his mouth and gets to his feet. “Good talk, Dimitri,” he says, and grabs his bag out of the trunk before his cousin gets any more ideas.

~~

The inside of the house is no better than its outside. Not that it’s unclean. If anything, it’s unusually tidy for the home of a bachelor and his surly teenage son. It’s more…cobwebby. And cold. And, uh…

“Uncle Rick?” Hogarth calls, “is this house haunted?”

Yeah, that.  
“No such thing as ghosts, kid,” Uncle Rick says, noncommittally scrubbing a frying pan in the sink, “just old houses and high-strung nerves. You kids eat on the road, or am I makin’ dinner twice in a night?”

“Not to be any trouble - “

“We ate on the road,” Jim says hurriedly.

“But maybe just if you had some leftover dessert - “

“I think we’d better just go to sleep,” he interrupts again. Hogarth elbows him and gives him a look, but he presses on despite it. “Where’re we sleeping, again?”

“Up the back stairs, down the hallway, third door on the right,” he says, jutting a thumb back. “Brown door, blue wallpaper. Can’t miss it.”

“But I wanted - “ Hogarth starts, and stops abruptly under the blaze of Jim’s carefully cultivated death glare. “I…will…go brush my teeth,” he corrects himself, grins toothily, and scampers up the stairs. Jim shrugs, throws his hands in his pockets, and moves to follow him.

“Hold up, Jim.” Rick turns to face him, drying his hands on a green dishcloth. Reluctantly, Jim pauses at the doorway, glances back over his shoulder. “Sarah says you’ve been in trouble a lot this past year.” Sullen silence. “It doesn’t matter to me nine months of the year how you act, but for these next three, I don’t want to deal with that in my house. So keep it to yourself. Got it?”

Jim blows a strand of hair from his face, but doesn’t break eye contact. “Yes, sir,” he grumbles.

“Good.” Rick considers him, then shifts back to the sink. “Sleep well, kid.”

Every single stair creaks under his boots, some so loudly that Jim wonders how they don’t give out. The higher he goes, the lower the temperature drops. Shivering under his jacket, he starts wondering if Hogarth’s ghost theory holds more water than he initially gave it credit for.

The kid’s…alright. If Jim’s being honest with himself (and he rarely is, these days), having Hogarth around has been a pacifying factor in his life. It doesn’t actually make his father’s behavior hurt any less, but knowing there’s someone else he’s done the exact same thing to - well - misery loves company. That’s all. Besides, Jim always _was_ good with kids, and Hogarth looks up to him, kind of. Clings to him is probably a better way to put it. It might annoy him, if he didn’t remember doing the same thing at that age.

Before she left, Jim’s mom had pulled him into a tight hug and made him promise to keep a close eye on the kid, like a stand-in parent. Maybe she knew just as well as he did that Rick had long since forgotten how to be a father to anyone under fifteen. Certainly anyone he isn’t allowed to threaten. All this in mind, Jim pokes his head through the door to Hogarth’s room. “Hey,” he says, “can I come in?”

Hogarth glances to him, and Jim realizes he’s pressed his ear to the wall, like he’s trying to eavesdrop on the room next door. A weird move, considering it’s the bathroom (and empty), but he doesn’t put too much thought into it. Especially since Hogarth puts a finger to his lips, then motions for Jim to approach. “There’s something inside the wall,” he whispers when Jim gets close enough to hear, “it’s scurrying around in there.”

“Oh yeah?” Jim murmurs indulgently, presses his own ear to the wall. Sure enough, the sound of scratching paws echoes faintly through. “What kinda something do you think it is?”

“Dunno. Could be a red squirrel,” he whispers hopefully, “they’re native to this area. Or maybe something bigger, like a cat or a raccoon or something.”

He considers telling the kid it’s probably just a rat, but dismisses this as kind of a dick thing to do. Instead, he jerks a thumb towards the small stack of cages piled in the corner of the room. “You gonna try to catch it tomorrow?”

Hogarth grins and nods vigorously. “Will you help me try and figure out where its nest is?”

Jim shrugs and smiles. “Sure, man,” he says, “but let’s save it for tomorrow, alright? It’s nearly midnight, and I’m gonna turn in. D’you brush your teeth?”

“C’mon, Jim. This is me we’re talking about.”

“So is that a yes or a no?”

Ten minutes later, Jim is settling quietly into his own bedroom, kicking off his boots and getting a lay of the land. The room itself is pretty barren, especially in contrast to Hogarth’s - other than the bed and a large wooden trunk, there’s no furniture, and other than one small frame on peeling wallpaper, there’s no decoration, either. Upon further inspection, the picture reveals itself to be a sepia-toned photograph of two people. Standing above, a tall woman, noble in stature, her face long and elven and almost catlike. Below, a young boy, stout despite his youth, square-jawed and serious. Both woman and child are drawn and reserved, eyes brutally serious. Jim squints at the small archival annotation at the bottom right of the photo in looping black-ink cursive. _‘Captain Amelia Smollet with her son’._

Great-great-aunt Amelia, he realizes. His mother had told him that this house was originally hers when it had first been built back in the 1890s or whenever. Which meant the boy in the picture had to be great-uncle Arrow - the crazy one. Dad had always called him “crazy uncle Arrow” - Jim had always laughed. He’d never really thought about great-uncle Arrow as a real person. Certainly never as a kid. Looking at a photo of him now is a little unsettling.

When he sleeps that night, he dreams of faraway ships, calling to one another through staccato morse lamps under a black and starless sky.

~~

Two days pass before anything interesting happens. When it does, Jim wishes it hadn’t.

Hogarth wakes him up in the middle of the night, shaking his shoulder and whispering his name. “I heard the thing in the wall again,” he says as Jim reluctantly rouses to consciousness, “I think it’s only up at night. We have to catch it now.”

Jim grunts, shifts in bed, scrubs a palm over his eyes. “ _Right_ now?”

“ _Jim,_ ” his brother says, shaking his shoulder again, “c’mon, please. _Pleeeeease?_ ” And he sets those huge doe-eyes on him before he can blink. Jim sighs and shakes his head.

“Alright, alright,” he concedes, “just make sure to keep it down. I don’t wanna deal with Dimitri if I can avoid it.”

Unfortunately, avoiding Dimitri proves to be impossible, since - despite it being 3:30 AM - he’s as awake as ever. “What the hell are you two doing up?” He snaps, like he’s got any room to talk.

“Like you’ve got any room to talk,” Jim snaps, “why’re _you_ still awake?”

“I’m doing homework,” Dimitri says smugly, despite the fact that it’s summer vacation, “anyway, I’m allowed to be up as late as I want, since I’m the oldest. So? What are _you_ doing?”

“Hogarth heard a noise,” Jim says, “we think there’s a squirrel or something in the wall. Keeps waking us up.”

“It’s not just me,” Hogarth complains, “it’s in your house. Haven’t you heard it too?”

“Look, this isn’t my house. It’s just a place where my dad lives. I only visit him for the summer, and he just moved here this year.”

Hogarth eyes him suspiciously. “So you…haven’t heard anything, then?”

Dimitri throws his hands in the air. “What I have or haven’t heard isn’t up for - it’s not relevant. What - where’d you here this, uh, wall-thing again?”

Now with their cousin (reluctantly) in tow, Hogarth heads the way into the kitchen, pausing at intervals to listen for something he alone seems able to hear. By the time Jim realizes he’s listening for scratching and following a logical pattern, the three of them are standing at an odd patch of wall by one of the cupboards. “It stopped here,” he says, “I think that’s where its nest is.”

“So what should we do?” Jim asks, glancing around at the wall. “Is there a vent nearby that we could get to it through, or - holy shit!”

In the brief meditative pause the brothers had taken to consider _logical_ options, Dimitri had retrieved a broom from the closet, and is now jamming it through the plaster, punching ugly holes in the wall. After a few precise strikes (Jim suddenly remembers Dimitri studies fencing with his mother during the school year), he reaches forward and easily pulls chunks of plaster out onto the floor. Nestled between the wooden planks of the house’s skeleton, there is, indeed, some kind of habitation, though it doesn’t look much like a nest. If anything, he’d describe it as a garbage menagerie. There’s the head of a baby doll with one eye missing, a collection of odd pins, brass buttons, toy soldiers with their arms cut off, feathers, newspaper clippings, old pen nibs - he can’t even identify everything in there. “Woah,” he says, impressed despite himself, “how cool is this?”

Dimitri clearly disagrees. “Gross,” he says after a minute, “I’m getting the garbage can.”

Hogarth cranes his neck up to see into the nest as Jim picks up a couple of the army men to look at. “No droppings. That’s weird,” he says, “I wonder what kind of animal it is. Squirrels usually don’t hoard thinks like this. It looks like a magpie’s collection, but a bird couldn’t get into an enclosed space like this.” He reaches for some of the buttons. “These look really old. Maybe they were great-uncle Arrow’s from when he was in the navy.”

“Whatever they are, they’re going in the bin,” Dimitri says, and starts grabbing handfuls to dump in the trash. Jim doesn’t bother arguing - it _is_ trash, even if it’s cool - but he pockets a couple of the soldiers, anyway, watches Hogarth rescue a few of the buttons from the corner of his eye.

The skittering starts up again, and all three of them turn to listen for it as it runs to the other side of the kitchen. Dimitri readies the broom again as they approach, but they pause unanimously as the sound changes - from the skittering of claws on wood to the scrape of nails on metal. “You guys hear that?”

His cousin snorts. “Yeah, there’s an animal in the wall, more at seven,” he says nastily. Jim scowls.

“Not that, idiot, I mean the metal. I think there’s a structure in there. Like a lockbox or a safe or something.”

Dimitri grunts, but he lowers the broom, clearly intrigued by the prospect of secret valuables despite his carefully crafted teenage apathy. The chatter leads them to a small door, painted to look like part of the wall. When it slides back, it reveals a small, empty metal cavity, and a rope pulley. Jim’s brow furrows. “What is it?”

“It’s a dumbwaiter,” Hogarth answers, grinning, “they’ve got one in this comic book I was reading. They used to be really popular in old big houses. That’s _so_ cool.” He glances up at the two baffled faces staring down at him and sighs in exasperation. “It’s like a little elevator,” he explains, “to send food from the kitchen to people upstairs. It probably goes to the master bedroom or something.”

“Well, wherever it goes, that squirrel or whatever is probably in the shaft,” Dimitri says, “someone’s got to go up and try to chase it out.” He tries to crawl in, but can’t get more than half his body in before retreating in defeat. “I can’t fit,” he admits, “I’m too big. One of you will have to go. Hogarth, you’re the smallest. Hop in.”

Jim looks at the tiny, dark metal box in increasing concern. He can’t bring himself to guess at the condition of the rope. “He’s not getting in there,” he says, grabbing his brother by the shoulder despite various protests, “it’s too dangerous.”

“I can do it!” Hogarth insists, scowling, “you’re not my dad, I don’t have to listen to you! Why _shouldn’t_ I go?”

“You’re scared of the dark,” Jim starts, counting on his fingers, “it’s pitch black, there’s a wild animal in there, we don’t know where it goes, and that rope is probably a million years old and about to break. Did I miss anything?”

Hogarth sticks his tongue out indignantly, but seems to be reconsidering. Dimitri sighs. “Fine,” he says, “then you go, Jim. I bet _you’re_ still small enough.”

Jim glares at him, but doesn’t argue. He’s barely over five feet, even though he’ll be fifteen in July. His mom is still taller than him, though she’s been reassuring him that his dad didn’t get a growth spurt until late, either. “Whatever,” he says, “if the rope breaks, and I fall, I’m blaming you.” He grunts and grumbles as he crams himself tightly into the box, but secretly, he feels a bit pleased. It’s not every day he finds something he can do that Dimitri can’t.

“I want to go up next,” Hogarth is saying as Dimitri starts working the ropes. The box jerks around Jim, pulling him up and into the shadowy dumbwaiter shaft. In just a moment, he’s engulfed in darkness.

At least the rope doesn’t break. The shaft isn’t too long, either, though the journey is so cramped it feels like ages. A few moments in the darkness is enough to remember his cell phone and its built-in flashlight, too, making Jim at least _minorly_ equipped to handle the situation. Still, when he finally reaches the top and unfolds himself, joints crying out in pain, he’s reluctant to get back in. “I’m at the top,” he calls down softly, “but I don’t see the squirrel.”

“I didn’t heft you all the way up there just so you could go on an _adventure,_ ” Dimitri replies, “keep looking.”

Jim grumbles to himself, turns his flashlight onto the rest of the room. It’s…dustier than most of the house is. Much dustier. There’s a certain level of clutter that implies habitual occupation, and yet it looks abandoned, like it was used every single day and then left in a hurry. If he were to guess, he’d say it was a library, or maybe a study. There’s four massive bookshelves on one wall, stocked with ancient tomes with leather bindings. Across the room, there’s a huge wooden desk coated in a thick layer of dust and piled high with tidy stacks of papers and odd jars full of dried plants and worn-down stones. On the wall above the desk, there’s a collection of framed watercolors, as well as a folded note that he thoughtlessly unpins and pockets. In the corner of the room, there’s a tall oak wardrobe and a small round window. But as Jim looks around, he realizes the room is missing one critical component.

There’s no door.

“Guys,” he calls down the dumbwaiter shaft, but before he gets a response, he hears two unwelcome sounds. From behind him, the scratching and skittering of an animal - from elsewhere in the house, the sound of uncle Rick, descending the stairs.

The animal problem is closer, and ergo more pressing. Jim wheels around, shining the light of his phone across the shelves in vain. From downstairs, he hears a distinctly upset “what are you two doing up?”

“There was a squirrel in the wall,” Hogarth’s voice floats up, “we wanted to catch it.”

“So you punched a hole in my wall and left garbage all over the…what is that?” A potent pause. Then, in a much more aggravated tone of voice, “Dimitri James O’Connell, if your cousin is in that dumbwaiter - “

Jim tunes the response out, looks back across at the desk. No animal. But in the dust on the desk, very clearly, something has written:

_GET OUT_

The phone in his hands drops to the floor and he scrambles back in silent terror. Without the light, in this unfamiliar room, he’s completely blind. Heart pounding in his ears, he feels his way back to the dumbwaiter, only to feel empty space where the box once was. He spins around, back to the hole, looking desperately into the darkness and breathing heavily.

“See? He’s not in here,” he hears Dimitri say weakly.

“Then where _is_ he?”

“Probably asleep upstairs, dad. How should I know?”

“Well, I suggest you two get upstairs and join him,” Rick snaps, “if I catch you up again, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

There’s a soft, chastised chorus of “yes, sir,” and then - to Jim’s horror - the sound of three people shuffling back up the stairs. Whether they realize it or not, they’ve abandoned and trapped him. With some embarrassment, he feels hot, frightened tears springing up in his eyes. “Hello?” He whispers into the dark room.

No answer.

“Hello?” He whispers again, twisting his hands into fists to steady his voice. “I know you’re there.” Silence. Not even the skittering of little paws. “I’m sorry I came in,” he tries, “I didn’t know this was a - a special place.” Nothing. He feels his temperature rising - fear being replaced by anger. He knows his face is flushing in the dark as his eyes adjusted slowly but surely. “Fine,” he snaps, “don’t talk to me. I don’t care anyway.” 

He sits in the silence. After a minute, he hesitantly crawls over to his fallen phone and picks it up, shoves it into his pocket, and feels the slip of paper in there - the one he grabbed from the desk. Maybe out of curiosity, but more likely out of spite, he pulls it out and uses the light from his phone to give it a closer look. Upon further inspection, he sees that it’s actually a folded note, and upon unfurling it, he notices that it’s written in the same looping black handwriting from the photograph in his room.

_‘In a man’s torso you will find_  
My secret to all mankind  
If false and true can be the same  
You soon will know of my fame  
Up and up and up again  
Good luck, dear friend’ 

Well, that’s…something. Bad poetry, for starters. A little gruesome, too, if he’s being honest. He folds it back up and tucks it back into his pocket, then jumps almost out of his skin as he hears a miserable scraping noise from behind him. After a moment, he realizes it’s just the dumbwaiter being pulled back up to the second floor. Heart pounding, he climbs in without a second thought.

“Welcome back,” Dimitri whispers as the box reaches the ground floor. “Why didn’t you just go back to your room? We had to come back down here and risk dad catching us, _again._ ”

“You’re not going to believe this,” Jim says, “it goes up to some kind of secret room. There wasn’t any door, that’s why I couldn’t get out. It was this, this study or lab or library or something. And there’s something up there - something wrote in the dust on this desk when I was up there - “

“Quiet down,” Dimitri whispers hurriedly, “anyway, you’re just getting worked up. Did you see the animal or anything?”

Jim scowls. He’s not sure why he expected Dimitri to believe him. “I _did_ see something,” he says bitterly, “I saw a note in the dust. It said _get out._ Like an angry ghost or something.”

His cousin rolls his eyes. “That could have been written ages ago.”

“No, it couldn’t have! I saw the desk before and there wasn’t anything written on it then!”

“Guys, _shush,_ ” Hogarth says in a panic, but it’s already too late. Rick’s heavy footfalls are storming down the stairs. 

“Maybe I wasn’t _clear,_ ” Rick snaps once he gets to the landing and flicks on the kitchen light, “all of you need to get _upstairs_ and into your rooms, _now._ Go on, before I forget my good manners and show you all the back of my hand. Or, god forbid, lock you in your rooms.”

“Nice job,” Dimitri snaps moodily at Jim as they head back up the stairs.

“Whatever. Get off my back. C’mon, Hogarth, let’s go.”

“I believe you,” Hogarth says, once they’re out of earshot of both the O’Connells, “about the note and the secret lab and stuff. Maybe we could try and find it again tomorrow.”

“Thanks, kid,” Jim says, and tries to smile. “But we’d better get to bed before we get into any more trouble.”

He hadn’t even wanted to get out of bed in the first place, he thinks to himself as he curls back up under his covers. And he’s happy to be here again.

~~

He wakes up the next morning to the dulcet tones of Dimitri screaming his head off.

It seems like everyone makes it to Dimitri’s room at the same time, but the same time is too late for all of them. 

The cloth of Dimitri’s long-sleeved shirt has been painstakingly punctured and pinned to the wrought-iron headboard of his bed - with him still in it, arms outstretched and confined like a hack crucifixion job. More disturbing, though, are the dark bruises and long, deep scratches on his face and hands, disappearing under his sleeves. Rick springs into action first, speaking with uncharacteristic gentleness and setting his hands to work at releasing his son from his confines. For his part, Jim’s jaw drops in horror before he quickly ushers Hogarth back out of the room.

“Just cut through it,” he hears his cousin wailing, nearly in tears, “cut it off! I just want to get out of this bed and out of this house! I hate this place!”

Hogarth stares up at his brother, wide-eyed, as they stumble down the stairs two at a time. “Is Dimitri going to be okay?” He asks.

“He’ll be fine,” Jim says, with a certainty he doesn’t really feel. Their cousin is such a drama queen most of the time, but right now Jim can sympathize entirely. Those gashes looked nasty. “But we’d better not bother him today, just in case.”

“Do you think it was the thing from last night that did it? The thing that wrote in the dust and everything?”

“Maybe,” Jim says, “but I don’t know for sure. Why didn’t it attack _us?_ ”

Hogarth shrugs. “We weren’t the ones who trashed it’s nest,” he suggests. “Anyway, if it’s being a movie ghost and picking us off one by one, I don’t want to be next - I’m getting out of the house.” He starts wriggling his too-big sneakers onto his feet as he chatters. “I’m going town to the pond - it’s tadpole season. I bet I can catch some.”

“Well, take your phone when you go,” Jim says distractedly. Dimitri has quieted down upstairs, but if uncle Rick doesn’t take scissors to that shirt, he’ll be stuck for ages. An hour, at least. _’Up and up and up again.’_

The note from last night seems less like poetry and more like a riddle, when he thinks about it. When Jim was Hogarth’s age, he loved riddles - coming up with them, solving them, stumping his mother and giggling as her face twisted in puzzlement. Once, his father had even agreed to read him the riddle chapter from The Hobbit, back when - when things were _better,_ when he - Jim shakes his head. Those thoughts won’t help him now.

The point is - the _point_ is, the note was pinned to the wall, not hidden away in a book or the desk or something, so it was _supposed_ to be found. And it reads like a clue. Almost in a daze, Jim takes it out of his pocket to read again.

_‘In a man’s torso you will find / My secret to all mankind’_ is easy - a ‘man’s torso’ in a riddle is always a chest. But that’s not exactly specific, especially in a house this big and old. There’s a trunk in almost every inhabitable room. The ‘secret to all mankind’ bit is more interesting. First off, it says a secret _to,_ not a secret _from,_ again implying it’s meant to be found. That, or it’s an answer to mankind, some kind of key, literally or figuratively. It also imparts that the riddle is directional, rather than conceptual - the location-heavy language elsewhere in the note backs that up - as the subject matter of the secret itself isn’t explored at all.

The next four lines are a little less intellectually stimulating. ‘ _If false and true can be the same / You soon will know of my fame’_ doesn’t mean anything to him, and the last line, _‘Good luck, dear friend’,_ only serves to rhyme with the line before it. If nothing else, though, that tells him _‘Up and up and up again’_ must be important - otherwise, why include it? He taps the paper thoughtfully.

“Hawkins,” a voice says, and Jim nearly jumps out of his skin. Uncle Rick, standing at the foot of the stairs, gives him a look. Jim hurriedly hides the note behind his back.

“What’s up?”

Rick eyes him suspiciously. “What’s with the paper?”

“It’s nothing,” Jim says, mind running wild, “just, uh, just a letter from my mom.”

“Really? We didn’t get any mail this weekend.”

“She gave it to me before we left,” he lies frantically, “to look at whenever I…when we…it’s none of your business, anyway.”

Rick raises an eyebrow, but (thankfully) doesn’t pry. “Relax, kid, that’s not what I came down here for,” he says, “I just wanted to grab the scissors.”

“Oh,” Jim says, “of course. How’s Dimitri doing?”

“Better, if you can call it that,” he replies, rustling through drawers noncommittally, “he’s still freaked out, but he says it doesn’t hurt anymore. Me, I’m just trying to figure out how this happened.” He pauses, glances over his shoulder. “ _You_ didn’t do it, did you?”

Jim feels like he’s been slapped in the face. “What?” He manages. “You think _I_ did that?”

“Nah,” Rick says, locates the scissors and snips the air experimentally, “just trying to cover all the bases. If I’m being honest, this house is probably evil. Everyone who’s lived here before us as died or gone crazy, which as far as I’m concerned is a pretty bad record.” He shoves the drawer shut.

“Why don’t you just leave?” Jim asks as he heads back up the stairs.

“Think I haven’t tried?” He calls back, and disappears upstairs, leaving a deeply discomforted teenager in his wake.

Jim looks back at the note. Maybe solving the riddle isn’t the best idea after all. Maybe it’ll just make the thing that’s doing all of this even angrier - but then again, he doesn’t have anything better to do. His brother is catching tadpoles (hard pass), and his cousin is stuck upstairs, and probably in a piss-poor mood besides. Descartes was wrong. The greatest inspiration for discovery isn’t curiosity - it’s boredom.

_‘Up and up and up again’_ \- that could mean a million different things. The study, up in the dumbwaiter? Up in a tree? Or maybe to the North - up on a _map._ Jim shakes his head. Whatever it is, it couldn’t hurt anything to go up to the attic.

On the first full day, he and Hogarth had explored most of the house, but uncle Rick had told them not to go into the attic on account of the weak, termite-infested wood. Keeping his brother safe had been reason enough to tamp down his curiosity then, but he’s alone now, and (as his mother often exasperatedly sighs) has no fear of death.

The stairs to the attic are set at an unusual place in the hall - not connected to either the front or back stairwell, but hidden in one of the unused bedrooms on the second floor. Before ascending, he looks out through the window towards the pond. Sure enough, Hogarth is there, sitting at the edge, poking at something with a stick. Jim smiles indulgently before making his journey upwards.

The stairs to the attic are claustrophobic, maybe only two feet across in a tight spiral, but at least they’re well-lit by natural sunlight and warm in the summer’s heat. Each step creaks dangerously under foot, and on two occasions, Jim hears the nerve-wracking sound of wood-fiber splintering. But nothing gives out before he makes it to the top. He decides to count this as a victory.

It’s less crowded than Jim figured a hundred-year-old inherited house would be. There’s a dress mannequin draped with cobwebbed fabrics and hats, a stack of ancient yellowing newspapers, and - as he suspected - a dark trunk, set under a great glass window. Otherwise, the room is empty, save for the swirling dust dancing slowly in the filtering light.

There’s nothing in the chest. At least, nothing much. Its main compartment has a couple musty sweaters from a forgotten time, as well as a naval uniform with moth-eaten holds and missing buttons. Just in case, he shakes everything out, pats the bottom hopefully - but no joy. He reads the note again. Alright, the first two lines and the last two lines make sense, but they’ve led him to a dead end. Unless - unless…

_‘If false and true can be the same / You soon will know of my fame’._ Something false that’s true - something false that’s _real._ A false bottom? He sets his hand down into the chest again, and realizes - yes - it _is_ too high. Further inspection reveals a drawer on the outside of the trunk, stuck from time but easily wrenched open with a little elbow grease. Inside, wrapped in loose fabric, sits the largest book Jim’s ever seen in his life, bound in worn red leather.

_‘Amelia Smollet’s Field Guide to the Invisible World Around You’,_ reads the cover. With no one around to impress, Jim grins widely at his discovery and sits against the now-empty trunk, cracking the book open with a fine mist of dust. The artwork is familiar - the beautiful watercolors hearken back to the illustrations from the study the night before. But the subject of the book isn’t landscapes. 

It’s monsters.

~~

When Jim emerges into the sunlight, heavy tome tucked under his arm, Dimitri’s on the front lawn in full fencing equipment, stabbing the hell out of the wall. Apparently, he’s trying to wash any remaining shame or weakness from the morning out of his hair by making the brickwork wish it’d never been born. Er, sculpted. He slows as Jim approaches, then drops the practice rapier to the grass and rips his helmet off his head. The glare he turns on him, coupled with breathing so heavy it shakes his whole body, would make lesser men crumble.

But Jim grew up with Leeland Hawkins. He scowls right back.

“Why’re you skulking out here, Hawkins?” He asks once Jim’s in range. “Run out of things to pin up inside?”

“You _seriously_ think I did that?” Jim snaps. “Newsflash: I don’t care enough to spend that much time doing _anything._ ” _‘Especially not something that fucked up and weird,’_ he adds on silently.

He can see that same realization dawning on his cousin. There’s a unanimous frustrated huff. “You’re not inventive enough to come up with that,” Dimitri concedes, “or fast enough to do it in the time. Or stupid enough to piss me off, for that matter.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “So? What do you think did it? _And if you say a ghost,_ I’ll wring you out until you become one yourself.”

“Nice threat,” Jim replies snidely, “no, I don’t think it was a ghost. My theory is genuinely stupider than that.” He pulls the book out from under his arm and holds it out to Dimitri, who takes it after a moment of hesitation. “It’s a field guide,” he explains hurriedly as he watches his cousin scrutinize it, “like for birds.”

“This is about _fairies,”_ Dimitri says, not exactly mocking but certainly unwilling to give the idea credit, “it’s like a picture book. Kid’s stuff.” He flips a page. “Where’d you get this, anyway? Buy it for your brother or something?”

“No, it was in the house - in the attic, with a bunch of other stuff. Look - it says Amelia Smollet is the author.”

“That sounds like a fake penname.”

“ _That_ is our great-great-aunt’s name, idiot. Crazy Arrow’s mom.”

“So maybe she wrote it for crazy Arrow before he went crazy. Lots of parents did stuff like that back in the whenever-ago.” He hums noncommittally. “This art is really good, though. I wonder what she did for a living that she got this good.”

“I _think_ she wrote field guides,” Jim says, “and I don’t think this was for a kid. The language is really dense. There’s some pretty advanced vocabulary in there.”

“Yeah, yeah, all vocabulary probably looks pretty advanced to _you,_ ” Dimitri says, and shuts the book with an older brother’s finality. “Look, if you want to, I dunno, get some _evidence_ to con me with, maybe I’ll go along with your fairy idea. Until then?” He shoves the book back into Jim’s unprotesting hands. “Keep the sissy stuff to a minimum, alright? Some of us are trying to practice fencing.”

Jim rolls his eyes, but doesn’t bother arguing. It figures Dimitri wouldn’t believe him, as per usual. Honestly, Jim kind of doesn’t even believe himself yet, except that this holds a little more water than the current ghost / evil house / whatever idea. At least Hogarth will be on board, whenever he gets back from the pond.

~~

“That’s _so_ cool,” Hogarth announces later that night, peering over Jim’s shoulder. “So you think it’s all real? Like the fairies and stuff?”

They’re sitting on Jim’s bed, the book spread out on his crossed knees. Hogarth, a little too anxious to sit still, is bouncing up and down on his knees, pausing for brief intervals to look at whatever new page of the guide his brother flips to. “I’m not sure,” Jim says, “but I think some of it’s real. Some of these pages have really limited information, or the pictures aren’t really clear, like she was drawing them from far away. But some of this stuff is too detailed to be fake. Like this one.” He points at the two pages currently open. On the left is a drawing of a small man in tidy, old-fashioned clothing, almost human save for a snout and unusually dog-like ears. On the right is a miserable green _thing,_ bipedal but utterly monstrous. “These two are supposed to be the same thing,” he explains, “but with different behavior. It starts off as a brownie, but only when it’s happy. When it gets upset, it turns into a boggart.”

“A boggart? Like in Harry Potter?”

“Dunno. But apparently they live in old houses - like this one - and if you keep them as brownies and feed them and stuff, they’ll help you clean your house and protect you. I think that’s what our problem is. I think there was a brownie here, but it turned into a boggart and now it’s coming after us, because we made it upset.”

Hogarth squints at the illustration of the boggart. It’s a pretty vile-looking thing, all told. “So that thing’s running around inside our walls?” He asks. “That’s really gross. But cool! But gross.”

Jim laughs indulgently. “I guess. No grosser than a raccoon.”

“So how do we make it happy again? What does it eat?” Ever the animal lover, Hogarth has ceased bouncing to lean in and run his finger over the page on brownies. “Maybe if we gave it something it liked, it would leave us alone. Or even help us out! See, it says here it likes honey and milk. There’s some in the kitchen.”

“I don’t know that that’s going to be enough,” Jim says. “We wrecked its house. And it really hurt Dimitri. What if we can’t make up for it?” He knows a thing or two about losing a home. His mom can’t afford the family B&B anymore, not since dad left and took the mining income with him. And now he’s stuck here, and at the end of the summer, he’s got to go to stupid Rockwell, where he’s never been. He shakes his head. “It probably hates us.”

Hogarth chews the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “Maybe it only hates Dimitri,” he says, “since he’s the one who threw all its stuff away. Maybe if we get Dimitri to apologize, it’ll leave us all alone.”

“And give all that garbage back,” Jim adds.

“Yeah. Maybe it misses its garbage!” Hogarth glances over his shoulder to the wall, like he’s suddenly worried the boggart is listening in on their conversation, then leans in to cup a conspiratorial hand over Jim’s ear. “I still have those brass buttons from last night,” he whispers, “if we get all the rest of the stuff out of the trash and give it back, maybe it’ll leave us alone.”

“Maybe,” Jim whispers back, and smiles. “Alright, let’s call it a plan for tomorrow. It’s late - we should go to sleep. Come on.”

But Jim doesn’t go to sleep - after Hogarth’s in bed and the house has gone quiet, he lies awake, arms crossed over his blankets, reading voraciously. He’d said that the information probably wasn’t all true, but that didn’t make it less interesting. Besides, he doesn’t know what is true and what isn’t. The more he reads, the more true it all seems - trolls, sprites, dwarves, goblins, a multitudinous array of creatures he could never have dreamed up in his life. It occurs to him that if brownies _do_ exist - at least, if there’s a brownie in the _house_ \- then almost everything else in the book might, too. But how could he know? Even making a new house for the little monster might not guarantee him a glimpse, or indeed any evidence (as Dimitri had so eloquently put it) to back the theory up. He’d have to get some himself.

On socked feet in the small hours of the morning, he slips out of bed and creeps downstairs to the kitchen, and lays a trap.

When he sits back to look at it again, it’s not a very _good_ trap. In point of fact, it’s just a tea saucer full of milk, surrounded by a thin dusting of flour coating the floor around it in a one-foot radius. It’s not really a trap to _catch_ the brownie, though, just to find out if it exists. So maybe that makes it okay. He considers sitting there until morning to see if anything happens, then yawns broadly, feels the exhaustion weighing him down. Two long nights in a row are wearing him down. Maybe he can sleep in tomorrow.

~~

Spoiler alert: he can’t. Dimitri is too busy being an outrageous asshole.

“Get up, Hawkins,” he snaps at the teenager-unfriendly time of seven-thirty in the morning, “and get downstairs, _now._ ”

“‘M up, ‘m up,” Jim says, waving his hand in front of his face protectively. “Jesus, what the hell is it this time? I _just_ fell asleep like an hour ago.”

“Oh, believe me, I _know,_ ” Dimitri hisses, grabbing Jim by the front collar, “we’re all _very_ aware of your nighttime activities, jackass.”

“What?” Either the exhaustion is taking too long to dissipate, or Dimitri is making absolutely no goddamn sense, because Jim can’t make out what he’s saying at all. “What’re you talking about? What’s going on?”

“Oh, you wanna _pretend_ you don’t know what’s happening? Wanna play dumb? Then I’ll _show_ you.” He grabs Jim roughly by the upper arm and drags him, despite his protests, down the stairs and into the kitchen, motioning wildly with his free arm. “Seem less funny now?”

Jim stares. The kitchen looks like a bomb went off inside. Flour coats every surface in a thin white haze, from the walls and counters to the ceiling and floor. The fridge door has been flung open, its contents spilled out and broken on the floor in a mash of eggs and dripping milk cartons. Some of the cupboard doors have been wrenched off their hinges - the oven is wide open and blackened with soot. At the table, eyes red and swollen with tears, Hogarth is staring blankly at an ice cube tray from the freezer. When Jim approaches, he sees twelve little tadpoles, frozen in individual blocks.

“I didn’t do this,” he says, the initial shock still coursing through his veins. Dimitri scowls and shakes his head. “I swear! I would never do anything _like_ this.”

“Sure you didn’t,” Dimitri says, and shoves a broom into his hands. “You can come up with a better denial than that while you’re spending the rest of the day cleaning this up.”

“I don’t think Jim did it,” Hogarth pipes up, his voice shaky with swallowed tears, “I think it was the boggart.”

Dimitri doesn’t say anything, just fixes Jim with a look so penetrating and bitter it would give hardened criminals nightmares. Clearly, the greatest sin in his eyes - far worse than the actual destruction of property - is the fact that Jim has made Hogarth believe the same stupid yarn he’s following. “Dad’s calling aunt Sarah,” he says after a moment, “sort this out before he gets back, or you can kiss this house goodbye.” With that, he storms out of the room, through the house, and out the front door. Jim is left alone with his crying brother.

“You didn’t do it,” Hogarth says after a long silence. Jim bites his lip and looks down, bitter resentment stinging at his eyes. “You like animals too much.”

“I don’t think that’s going to change how Dimitri feels,” Jim says, and sits heavily in the chair across from his brother, “or my mom. We can’t prove it - I can’t prove it.”

“Yes you can,” Hogarth says quietly, “there’s tracks.”

Jim looks down in the flour near the saucer. Sure enough, in the light dusting - at least, what hasn’t been washed away by the overturned milk - there’s a distinct trail of footprints. They look like tiny versions of human feet, with a round heel and five toes. He feels a crooked smile growing on his face, despite the sinking terror in his stomach. “Hey,” he says, “yeah. Look at that.”

“It’s _really_ mad, Jim,” Hogarth says, wipes his eyes uselessly on the sleeve of his pajamas, “how’re we gonna apologize to it?”

Jim looks at his little brother’s tear streaked face, and the poor, stupid tadpoles frozen in ice. He doesn’t want to apologize. He wants to find the boggart and hurt it and make it pay until it’s apologizing to _them._ But that’s not going to help them now. He sighs and shakes his head. “Don’t worry about that right now,” he says, “I’ve got to clean the kitchen. When that’s done we can work on making a plan, if we’re even allowed to stay.”

Hogarth nods mutely, gets to his feet, and shuffles quietly out of the kitchen, holding the ice tray in his hands like an ancient relic. Knowing him, he’s probably going to bury them in the front yard, or out by the pond. Jim shakes his head - he used to be like that, quick to fall in love with any pet that would have him and completely distraught by the death of any tiny creature. He hopes the kid can work through it quickly.

Then he takes the broom in his hands, blinks wetly, and brushes all of his evidence into the garbage.

Normally, he tries to play it cool around his uncle, but today’s a little different. When Rick gets home, two bags of groceries in his hands, Jim jumps on the opportunity to talk to him. “Did you call my mom?” He asks. “I didn’t do this. I know what it looks like, and I know that - that it makes sense for it to be me, but I swear I didn’t. I - “

“Relax, kid, I didn’t rat on you,” Rick interrupts, setting the bags down on the counter. “I make it a habit not to be a narc. At least, not when I don’t understand the situation. I’m not saying I think you’re innocent - I’m just saying there’s no reason to think you’re guilty.”

“But Dimitri - “

“Dimitri’s scared, and he’s projecting. Thinks the only way to look tough is to look angry.” Rick shrugs, starts emptying the bags and putting things away. “He doesn’t know what’s happening, and he can’t blame me since I’m his dad, and if he tried to blame your brother you’d give him too much pushback. So he’s blaming you. Probably’ll keep blaming you until you can prove you didn’t do this.” He shrugs. “I can talk to him about it, but it’s not going to stop him.”

“So you didn’t call my mom?”

“Hm? Oh, your mom. Sure, I called her. Not about this, though - that dame’s stressed enough without knowing about any of this crap. She asked me to check in near the end of the week to tell her how it’s going. She’ll probably call you tonight.”

“Oh.” Jim looks around the kitchen. Fourteen years of helping around the Benbow B&B has given him a serious talent for cleaning quickly and efficiently - other than a little flour on he ceiling fan and the bags of garbage leaning against the wall to be taken outside, there’s almost no sign that anything happened here at all. “I guess I’ll…go see what my brother’s up to,” he says uncertainly, “make sure he’s not getting into any trouble.”

“You do that,” Rick says distantly, as if slipping into some deeper train of thought. “Take the trash out to the curb before you go.”

“Yes, sir.”

In a tough but stupid show of senseless bravado, Jim decides to take all four bags of garbage out at the same time, two in each hand. Never mind the fact that they’re huge, heavy, and barely able to fit through the door - he just wants to get out of the kitchen as quickly as possible. Which means, of course, that one of them rips from the bottom halfway across the yard, and Jim, frustrated and cursing his luck, has to stop, drop everything, and survey the damage. He tries to shove the streaming trash back in through the hole, but there’s too much, and he jams his finger on a pin accidentally. Blood. Just another thing he didn’t need in his life. Anger burning hot on his neck, he grabs a baby doll’s head up and hurls it back down into the wet grass with a wordless cry, clenching his hands into fists.

He stands perfectly still, listening to the birds waking up with the early morning. It’s only nine-thirty now - despite the summer season, the morning is foggy and cold, only just beginning to dissipate. He looks back down at the spillage. The baby doll’s head - that was in the brownie’s nest, wasn’t it? He picks it up again, catching his breath. All the pins, like the one he stabbed himself with, are there too. Everything from the creature’s nest is all spilling out of the corner of this one bag. He picks up a couple scraps of newspaper. Each one has a different weird word on it. _’Susurrus,’_ reads one, and _’Hydrangea’_ another. There’s a lot of stuff, when he looks at it more clearly. It must have taken a long time for a creature as small as the brownie to collect it all.

He thinks, angrily, about his crying brother. But that anger is joined by thoughts of the Benbow, of his mother counting and recounting numbers in her budget with increasingly worried lines crossing her face. He picks up everything he can fit in his hands and goes off to find Hogarth.

~~

“Hey, you’re done,” Hogarth says as Jim approaches. His woes of the morning seem to have been mostly forgotten, or at least rationalized, and instead of weeping, he’s working on something in the garage. “C’mere, look at this.”

As he gets closer, Jim peers over his brother’s shoulder. He’s holding a birdhouse with a large oval cut out of the front, just large enough for a child’s hand. Inside, there’s a small stack of brass buttons against a back corner and a couple armless army men. “Did you make this?” Jim asks.

“Yeah, kinda,” Hogarth says, with a toothy grin that betrays any modesty, “Dimitri helped me out a little. He’s sorry about what he said before,” he amends, eyes stern and serious as he plays the part of the pacifier, “and he wanted to apologize, but - you know how he is. So when he came out here and I told him what I was doing, he said he could at least believe you about the brownie thing. So he cut the hole in the front for me so I wouldn’t hurt myself on it.”

Jim takes the birdhouse and peers inside. He’s a little skeptical that Dimitri’s _actually_ sorry - it’ll take an apology direct from his mouth to believe it - but he believes that his cousin would humor Hogarth, especially after the turmoil of the morning. “Looks like you spent a long time on this,” he says.

“Yeah, well…you know. There wasn’t anything _else_ to do,” Hogarth says, kicking his feet. “It’s a house for the brownie - I thought maybe we could take it up to the study in the dumbwaiter with some honey or something and write an apology letter. You know, so he knows we’re sorry.”

“That’s really smart. I was just going to give him all this trash back.” He holds out the pile sheepishly. “Should we put some of this inside there? I feel like there’s more, but this was all I could dig out.” 

“I’ll put it together,” his brother says triumphantly, “you’ve got to go talk to Dimitri. He needs to be there for the apology, otherwise the brownie might not accept it.”

Jim considers arguing, but Hogarth gives him a Look with a capital L. “Alright, alright. I’ll go find him.”

“He’s in the TV room.”

“Alright.”

“Feeling guilty.”

_“Alright._ ”

Dimitri is, in fact, in the downstairs living room (dubbed the TV room by the youngest member of their family due to it being the sole location of the TV). He’s sitting in an uncomfortably hunched position on the soft, fat armchair in the center of the room, playing something on his phone and very pointedly ignoring Jim when he walks in. Jim, who doesn’t want to be here either, leans against the doorframe and folds his arms. “Hey,” he says, “Hogarth said I’d find you here.”

“Hawkins. Hey.” Dimitri glances up, then stares down at his phone even more intensely than before. There’s an awkward silence.

“So.”

“So…I’m sorry,” he says, like the apology hurts coming out, “I guess I didn’t know if you were - if you actually did it. I just figured, since you’re such a problem child back home, it must’ve been you.”

“Thanks, I think.” Jim shifts uncomfortably. “Look, I know you don’t believe it, but Hogarth and I are going to go write an apology note in the study upstairs. The brownie idea might be a bad one, but it’s the best bad idea we’ve got. And - Hogarth really thinks you should come. He doesn’t think it’ll work unless we’re all there.”

“I can’t fit in the dumbwaiter.”

“There’s probably a door in the study. Great-great-aunt Amelia was supposed to be really tall - there’s no way she got up with the dumbwaiter. We can probably get you in.”

Dimitri sighs, like he’s going to argue, then lets his head hit the back of the chair. “Fine,” he says, “let me know when we’re going up.”

~~

Hogarth insists on going up first this time. Since the dumbwaiter’s rope has been tested by Jim’s significantly greater weight, Jim figures it’s probably safe. Well, safer. The birdhouse and honey goes up with him - when Jim joins him carrying a notebook and a pen, he’s standing in the center of the room, gazing around, eyes shining. “This place is _wicked,_ ” he whispers, “look at all these books! And those paintings, and those rocks. A secret study, in our house! We’re the luckiest kids in America.”

“It’s pretty cool,” Jim agrees as his brother sets the birdhouse down on the desk. “Come on, let’s find the door so Dimitri can get up here.”

Hogarth sets about pulling on various books on the shelves, as though one of them might be a secret lever. Jim takes the altogether more practical route of looking behind the bookshelves - and, failing that, poking around in the wardrobe. Behind the shirts and jackets and whatever else, there’s another door in the back, leading into the linen closet. “Found it,” he announces.

“You always find _everything,_ ” Hogarth complains, but trots over to admire the secret entrance anyway. “It’s like Narnia through here,” he says after a minute, “hang on, let me go get Dimitri.”

In two minutes, all three boys are standing in the study, staring around in varying degrees of awe. “This place is real,” Dimitri says, somewhat shocked, “I just assumed you were making it up.”

“I’m aware,” Jim says. “Can we write this letter now and get out of here, before anything creepy happens?” His memories of this room are poor at best. At least in the daytime, it’s well-lit, but the _GET OUT_ still written on the desk is making him nervous.

“Dimitri has to write it,” Hogarth says, “he has the best handwriting.”

“Fine, fine,” Dimitri says, waving his hand above his head, “just tell me what to write.” He sits down at the desk, opens the notebook to a fresh page, and clicks the pen a couple times experimentally.

“Dear boggart,” Hogarth begins.

“Isn’t that kind of rude? Can we say that?”

“I already wrote it.”

“Okay. ‘Dear Boggart,’” Hogarth says again, “‘we’re sorry for messing up your house and throwing away your things. We made this house in apology for the one we screwed up. Please accept it and the honey, and even if you don’t forgive us, please stop pinching us and breaking things and hurting our pets.’ What else should we say?”

Jim thinks about this. “How about ‘we’re stuck in this house too, and we can’t leave, even though we want to sometimes. And if there’s anything else you want, please tell us and we’ll try to get it for you. We’re really sorry.’ And then we sign our names?”

“Fine by me,” Dimitri says, already scrawling his signature on the bottom of the page. Hogarth signs next, then finally Jim. He rereads it, then folds it up and tucks it into the birdhouse.

“Okay,” he says, and lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, “let’s go.”

~~

Nothing happens that night. That’s the first sign. Jim wakes up late - no one shaking him or yelling at him or pulling on his hair or screaming or whatever else - and dresses at his own pace. Rick makes everyone breakfast in the mostly clean kitchen. Everything seems…normal. Like the past three days never happened. Jim calls his mom in the afternoon, talks with her for nearly half an hour, then hands the phone off to Hogarth as his mom hands the phone off to Annie and gives them some privacy. He sits in companionable silence with Dimitri, watching cat videos on youtube. The day passes easily.

In fact, by four in the afternoon, when uncle Rick heads out of the house for work, Jim’s almost forgotten they have something they need to do. Hogarth hasn’t, though - as soon as the car pulls out of the driveway and down the road, he grabs both boys by the hand and drags them up the stairs with a frantic “c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon” and a spring in his step. Jim kind of isn’t expecting to see anything different in the study, but the letter they left in the birdhouse is gone. 

“So that’s…weird,” he says.

“Indeed, I expect it is,” says a completely unfamiliar voice, and all three whirl around to see a six-inch tall man, standing on the desk. “You must be the three brothers,” he continues on, “a pleasure to meet you. I am the noted astrophysicist Dr. Delbert Doppler. Perhaps you’ve heard of me! Oh, just kidding. Just a little humor. Of course you haven’t heard of me. I haven’t published any work in decades.” He laughs. Jim looks wildly at his two companions. Hogarth’s eyes are shining like the sun. Dimitri looks like someone’s just punched him in the face, but he hasn’t figured out what’s happened yet and is reasoning backwards from evidence he doesn’t have.

“Uh…hi, doc,” Jim says uncertainly, “do you…like the house?”

“The house? Oh, yes, the house! Well I just don’t know. It’s a nice color, and it does have many of my possessions. But that isn’t why I revealed myself to you. As my master has long since passed on into the great beyond, I must be the one to tell you this - give up the book.”

Jim’s brow furrows. “The book? You mean Amelia’s Field Guide?”

“Exactly! The field guide! You must give it up. Destroy it if you can, but read no further than you have. The amount of harm it will bring to you if you pursue its information further is indescribable. There are evils in this world which you cannot comprehend, who will stop at nothing to attain that book! I say this only to warn you. Farewell, brothers - we will see each other again soon.” And then he’s gone, as soon as he appeared.

Dead silence.

“Oh my god,” Dimitri says, and sits down on the ground. “Oh my god, what the fuck.”

“Dr. Delbert Doppler? What kind of name is Dr. Delbert Doppler?”

“I thought he looked cool,” Hogarth says helpfully, “he was wearing cool clothes from like, the seventeen hundreds or whatever.”

“Oh my god that thing is real, that was a real thing that happened, what the fuck.”

Jim sits down on the ground next to his cousin as Hogarth starts pacing back and forth across the rug, chattering aimlessly. “So…I guess you believe me now,” he can’t help but say. Dimitri glares at him and punches him in the shoulder with more strength than is really necessary.

There’s another pause, though this one is less filled with silence and more filled with Hogarth’s rapid-fire talk about everything and nothing. Dimitri looks like he’s thinking hard about something. “Jim,” he says at last, “that book you handed to me before. The one from two days ago. That’s the book the little - fairy guy was talking about, right?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Amelia’s field guide.”

Dimitri’s eyes fix solidly on the ground. “That book was pretty big, right?”

Jim shrugs. “I guess. Mostly it was just old and heavy, I think.”

“Yeah, but…” Dimitri struggles visibly. “But I mean - that fairy thing was real. The book was right about it being real. And it said everything in it was true. Jim - that’s a lot of _real things._ ”

Jim thinks about it. “Yeah,” he says, slowly losing his grounding, “I guess it is.”

END OF CHAPTER ONE.


	2. The Seeing Stone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, two-to-five people who have read or are continuing to read this fic! Thanks for reading chapter one, and for any feedback you might have given me, here or on tumblr - comments make me write faster! There's actually action going on in this one, as well as some familiar names and faces. 
> 
> This chapter comes with a warning. Remember that tag on this fic about animal death? This is your reminder that I was serious about that!

“So where’s the dump?”

“By the scrapyard.”

“Oh.” Hogarth considers this. “Where’s the scrapyard?”

“By the dump.”

Hogarth scowls and slumps back in his seat while uncle Rick chuckles victoriously and makes an illegal left turn. Jim turns to give him a sympathetic look, then returns to staring blankly out the window. He hates getting stuck in the back seat of the car, especially Rick’s tiny Volkswagon - and _especially_ when Dimitri is sitting in front of him, his seat so far back it crushes into his legs. Last week, he would have leapt at the chance to go on a trip anywhere, just to be out of the house. Today, the fourth day in a row of running day-long errands, his cabin fever has been translated into this seat.

He slumps lower, fingers prodding curiously at the shiner on his cheekbone. Less than a month at uncle Rick’s, and he’s already gotten into a fight. Mom had been _so_ disappointed over the phone.

“Hey, uncle Rick, is _that_ the dump?” Hogarth asks, pointing at something out his window. Jim, relieved to replace his crushing self-deprecation with something concrete, cranes his neck around to look.

“Nah, that’s the quarry,” Rick replies, “hold your horses, we’re almost there.”

“Oh, the _quarry,_ ” Hogarth sighs knowingly, then leans over to his brother and whispers “Jim, what’s a quarry?”

“It’s like a farm for rocks,” Jim whispers back, “like where they mine for slate and coal and stuff to make concrete with.”

“Oh. Cool,” he says, though he seems unconvinced by how cool this may or may not be. “What kind of stuff lives in a quarry?”

“I dunno. Rats and stuff, I guess. Maybe crows.”

“ _Jim,_ ” Hogarth starts to whine, then catches the meaningful look Jim gives him and glances towards Rick. “You - I mean…you _know_ crows don’t live in rocky terrain,” he hurriedly corrects himself.

It’s been three weeks since Jim found the book and calmed the brownie. Dr. Doppler has been surprisingly helpful, all things considered, though the increase of rations (from nonexistent to practically daily) probably has something to do with it. And after that first week, nothing weird has really happened. (Well, nothing weird and _bad_. There’s still a literal fairy living in their house and doing their dishes.) In that time, Jim has made precisely one attempt to tell uncle Rick what’s going on. The scorn and derision it was met with has guaranteed Jim’s new and continued silence.

Worse still was the fact that Dimitri had refused to back him up. Hogarth, ever the optimist, and (for what it’s worth) only ten years old, had sprung to Jim’s defense, but Dimitri, sixteen and by proxy the most believable witness, had clammed up. That burned more than anything else - when he was a kid, Jim had always looked up to Dimitri as the cool older brother he’d never had. Disappointment stung.

The point is, though all three boys know with certainty that fae _exist_ , it had become a rule to never talk about them in front of Rick. That’s made the past few days in the car especially difficult for Hogarth, who’s curious by nature and dislikes having things kept from him. When they finally arrive at their destination and Rick cuts the ignition, he’s the first one to spring out the door. Their uncle rolls his eyes good-naturedly and announces he’s going to go talk to “the guy”, tells them not to wander far from the car. The second he’s out of earshot, Hogarth pounces.

“So what kind of stuff lives in a quarry? Or a dump, or a scrapyard?”

“Quarries usually have boulder trolls, and Smollet says this one might have dwarves, but she never saw them,” he rattles off. He knows his brother well enough to have prepared for the question. “Junkyards usually only get goblins, and scrapyards usually - if anything - have salamanders. Sometimes gryphons, if you’re lucky.”

“Gryphons?”

“They eat metal,” Jim explains before realizing that the question came from his cousin, not his brother. He scowls, and adds “not that you really care,” for good measure. Dimitri looks a little hurt.

“C’mon, Hawkins,” he says, sounding more reasonable than he really is, “you can’t stay mad at me forever.”

“Watch me,” he snaps back, shoves his hands into his pockets, and migrates away. He pretends not to notice that Hogarth hurries to Dimitri for some kind of comfort. Their cousin’s betrayal isn’t as personal for him as it is for Jim - the field guide isn’t as important to him. Neither of the other boys get it. They haven’t read the book like he has, so many times that Amelia Smollet almost feels like a friend. Listening to her work being disrespected pains him.

Whatever. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need either of them for what he wants to do here. Amelia says that the secret to observing the world of the fae is acquiring the Sight. Some people - Amelia herself included - are lucky enough to be born with the Sight, by being red-haired or the seventh son of a seventh son. Other people - most people - aren’t so lucky. Remedies are few and far between, and most are pretty gross, like drinking dragon piss or having a hobgoblin spit into your eyes. Jim doesn’t want to go that way if he can avoid it - he’s more interested in finding what Amelia refers to as a “seeing stone”.

A seeing stone, Amelia says, is any rock with a naturally formed hole through the center. She suggests river stones as the best alternative, as they wear down easily and are typically stronger due to their relationship with water. But Jim’s been down to the pond and the nearby stream every day for almost two weeks and still hasn’t found one. He’s willing to look anywhere at this point, even the dump.

Back up at the car, Rick has returned and is now accompanied by “the guy”, who Jim can identify from this distance as a dark-haired, half-shaved young man in sweatpants and sunglasses, smoking and talking slowly. Rick, who’s detaching the trailer from the car, is listening, grinning, and laughing. Really laughing. Like…a lot. Jim squints.

When he gets back, just as unsuccessful in finding the stone as ever, “the guy” is chatting pleasantly with Hogarth. They both turn to smile at him has he approaches. Well, Hogarth smiles, anyway. “The guy” tips down his shitty aviators to peer at Jim over them, with a lopsided mouth that might, if one was feeling generous, be considered a smirk. “Hey, Jim,” Hogarth says, “this is Dean. He’s the guy in charge of the dump and the quarry and all the cool stuff out here.”

“Nice to know there’s one person on earth who thinks what I do is “cool”,” Dean says. He’s got a weird accent, like New York, but older - something Jim can’t identify. “You’re Hogarth’s big brother, yeah? Jim? Nice to meet you.” He holds a hand out to shake, loose and low at the elbow, like holding it up is physical effort that he’s unwilling to exert. Jim eyes it with distrust, and only takes it after his brother clears his throat meaningfully.

“Yeah, that’s me,” he says, guarded and reluctant, “so you…run the garbage in this city?”

Dean laughs, the cigarette in his mouth shaken but not lost. “Sure, that’s - that’s some way to put it,” he says, “can’t say I really _run_ stuff, though. I just kinda keep an eye on the scrapyard at night and the junkyard by day.”

“What about the quarry?”

“Quarry’s abandoned. No one’s used it in years. The city just pays me to ‘watch’ it so they don’t have to hire anyone else.”

Jim thinks about this. If anyone would have seen fae messing around, it’d be the guy living on the furthest edge of town, covering a huge amount of ground. Two hundred acres, at least. “When you’re out here, do you ever see anything weird happen?”

“What’re you, a cop?” Dean asks, and laughs. Jim doesn’t. “Nah, I don’t see much criminal activity out here, if that’s what you’re asking. Sometimes you get people tryin’ to steal scrap - you’d be amazed how many people wanna take garbage metal - but that’s about it.”

“Huh. Weird,” Jim says. Hogarth gives a little laugh of agreement.

“Hey, boys, quit chatting and get in the car,” Rick calls as he approaches. “Dean, are the kids bothering you?”

“What? Nah, they’re fine. It’s good to have a little conversation now and again, you know? See you kids around sometime.” He gives another sideways grin and a little wave as Jim takes his brother by the shoulder and ushers him back into the car.

The back windows are still open, which means while Dimitri and Hogarth are arguing over what music to listen to on the long ride back, Jim leans out and catches the end of the adults’ conversation. “…But I mean, anything for you, O’Connell,” Dean is saying.

“You know, you can call me Rick.”

“Sure. Of course. See you in a few weeks, then, Rick. Drive safe, alright?”

Jim peers out through the back window in time to see Rick put an awkward hand on Dean’s shoulder, then hurry away back to the car. He squints. Weird.

~~

When it all clicks into place, Jim can’t exactly say he’s surprised. Startled, maybe, for a moment or two. Then it’s just another piece of information to add to his rapidly growing pile of things that don’t affect him.

Boredom is pretty much Jim’s entire driving motivation in the summer. It’s the entire reason he even discovered the book at all, and for that, he figures he owes it some gratitude, feeds it whenever he can. Right now, it’s driving him to clean out the garage or at least the closest thing to a garage this old Victorian house has, which is an actual carriage house. A _carriage house._ It hasn’t been used in years, partially because no one uses carriages anymore, but more significantly partially because it’s crammed with garbage. Apparently when crazy Arrow lived here, he didn’t believe in throwing anything away. Huge leather trunks and nailed wooden boxes line one wall, stacked claustrophobically on top of each other. The other two are thick with shelves stuffed with mason jars, each one full of amber liquids. The whole shack reeks of mildew and petrol, encouraging him to leave the wide double-doors open and get what air he can inside.

Probably because of this, Hogarth approaches him in the early afternoon, carrying a flat bowl of milk in both hands and looking anxious. “Jim, have you seen Ping?” He asks, as Jim cracks open another wooden crate with the rusty iron crowbar he’d found on the wall a few hours earlier. “I’ve been looking for him everywhere and I can’t find him.”

Jim grunts with effort as the lid finally pries apart, revealing - surprise, surprise - yet another box full of old newspapers. He sighs disconsolately. “Did you ask Dimitri yet?” He asks in reply. “Anyway, I thought you already had two cats. Why did you even get another one?”

“I didn’t _get_ him,” Hogarth says, “he was hurt and in trouble! I _had_ to nurse him back to health. Anyway, I released Simon and Mallory last week. It’s about _rehabilitation_.”

“You still feed them at the back porch when you think uncle Rick’s not looking,” Jim points out.

“Those are family gatherings. They want to come home and eat my cooking. It’s not that weird.”

“It’s a little weird.”

Hogarth huffs indignantly. “Well, it’s not as weird as going through crazy Arrow’s trash,” he deflects, and points at the stacks of garbage and empty containers, “what are you even doing out here?”

“I’m just cleaning the carriage house out so it can be used as a garage or something,” Jim says, “clearly no one’s cleaned it in years. I found a newspaper from 1893 in one of these boxes. I figured if we threw most of this stuff away and swept it out, it might be a kind of nice place to do something with.” _And it would give uncle Rick an excuse to go back to the dump,_ he thinks, but isn’t stupid enough to say out loud. Hogarth would want to know what he was talking about, and he kinda respects Rick’s privacy. At least enough to not explain it to a ten year old who struggles with keeping even the most benign secrets.

“Well, you do you, I guess. I’m gonna go look around in the backyard. By the way, don’t bother Dimitri - he’s really fencing and he’s in a _mood_.” At this, Jim glances up and over Hogarth’s shoulder. Sure enough, his cousin is on the front lawn in a sweaty tank and sweatpants, beating the shit out of the air in front of him. He resolves to go in through the back door.

“Hey, Hogarth,” he calls hurriedly as his brother starts to walk away, “did you give Doppler his rations yet?”

Hogarth, back turned and moving quickly, makes a farting noise with his mouth. “That’s your job, not mine,” he calls back, and disappears behind the house. Jim shakes his head and blows air out of his cheeks.

So, okay, he should probably take a break to go honey up the professor. But he’s just opened a box - might as well empty it out, first. There’s a handful of newspapers with weird titles - when he scoops them out of the way, there’s a small collection of boxes underneath. They’re made of nice wood, certainly nicer than anything else in the shed. Actually, they kind of look like the boxes his mom keeps her jewelry in, and he opens them with interest. The first is empty. The second is stuffed with waxy candle stubs. The third…

The third box holds some sort of device. It looks like a - a leather eyepatch, or a monocle, or something. There’s a strap to go around the head and an adjustable nose clip, and a small series of magnifying lenses that click in and out of place like a lever. He tries to put it on over his left eye, but the head strap is too loose and the nose clip is too tight. Both look adjustable, though, so he pockets it for later and stands up, brushing dirt off his pant legs. This project is getting to him. It’s time for a break.

Even though it used to creep him out, the study has become Jim’s favorite place in the house. The window has a good view of the yard, there’s tons of books, and it’s quiet, something the rest of the house can’t speak to. Neither of the other boys come up here much, if ever. Maybe they’re frightened, or maybe they just don’t care about all this fairy stuff. And he gets that, actually, he really does. It’s weird, and kinda creepy if it’s given too much thought, and other than Doppler, they haven’t seen anything in weeks.

Speaking of Doppler…

“Doc?” He calls into the still air, shutting the wardrobe door behind him, “you in here?” No reply. Jim shrugs - knowing the brownie, he’s probably off organizing Hogarth’s sock drawer, or cleaning the attic or whatever. Jim can’t be bothered to feel offended or hurt by the absence of a reply - he just sets the bottle of honey down on the desk and gets on with his business.

Doppler isn’t the only reason he comes up here, although the other boys don’t know that. Actually, he’s been teaching himself to draw. It’s slow going, and frankly, he’s really awful at it, but he’s not going to let that stop him. The field guide has a lot of missing information that Jim wants to fill in, but if he wants to do that, he has to be able to draw. It might be easier if he had a book on how to use watercolors or something, but he can’t get one or ask for one without his family finding out, and his brother would ask to see his work, and - anyway, he’s resigned himself to trial and error.

“Master Hawkins,” he hears from behind him, and turns to smile at the little professor standing on the desk, “how rare to catch you here these days. You’ve been otherwise occupied, haven’t you?”

“Sorry, Doc. Rick’s been bussing our asses all over town this week.” The doctor gives him a look, and he sighs. “Aaand before that, I was looking for a seeing stone,” he admits, “down at the pond and the stream. Amelia had the Sight naturally, but I don’t.”

“What?” He looks aghast. “Down at the _pond?_ ”

Jim frowns. “Well, yeah,” he says, “Amelia says - “

“Yes, I _know_ what Amelia said,” Doppler snaps, and he kind of looks…angry. Jim squints. “I was _there_ when she wrote it! Are you honestly telling me you’ve spent weeks searching everywhere but _here_? You _really_ think she didn’t have her own, here in her _Sanctum Sanctorum_?” He points at the jars of plants and rocks on the desk.

Jim’s not sure what to think or do for a second - he can’t even get his head around Doppler’s sudden anger - but after a moment, he picks up the jar filled with rocks and dumps it out on the desk. Most of the stones inside are grey and soft around the edges - river stones - but a number of them are spherical and impossible to use. He sorts through them quickly, until - yes, there.

A round, flat stone with a naturally formed hole in the middle. With a grin, he holds it up to his eye. “Hey, this is it,” he says, “you know, in the carriage house, I found this eyepiece in Arrow’s stuff that was about this size. Was that supposed to be…” he trails off and glances to the desk. Even through the stone, Doppler is gone. “Doc?”

No answer. Jim sighs and lowers the stone - the brownie’s cross about something, and despite his cluelessness about where he went wrong, Jim knows when to apologize. Sometimes. “Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been around,” he tries, crossing his arms defensively, “I didn’t mean to ignore you, or to insult you. I just thought I could do it myself, if I followed Amelia’s instructions.”

“Stop calling her by her first name,” Doppler replies after a moment, and Jim follows the sound of his voice to catch him by the windowsill. “She never liked to be called that except by her husband. It’s too personal.”

“Oh.” Jim thinks about this. On the one hand, it seems like such a stupid thing to get upset over. On the other hand, he thinks he understands it. Doppler worked really closely with her, from what he’s gathered, and it’s more personal for him. “Sorry. I didn’t know. Should I, uh, should I call her Smollet, or…?”

Doppler isn’t really looking at him at all. He’s staring down at something on the lawn. “She was always partial to ‘Captain’, or ‘ma’am’ in person,” he says distantly, like he’s recalling something painful. Jim remembers from the guide that brownies usually live to be four or five hundred years old, that six human years are maybe one of theirs. To him, her death must not have been so long ago.

“You and Captain Smollet were pretty close, right?” He asks. The brownie doesn’t respond verbally, but those floppy ears twitch and lower. Jim nods in understanding and turns to look out the window. Down on the lawn, Hogarth is meandering aimlessly, calling for his new cat while Dimitri - headphones on - seems to be practicing parries and _riposte_ in rhythm to whatever he’s listening to. Probably Hungarian folk music or a Broadway hit soundtrack, if his youtube history is to be believed. (Jim hasn’t brought that up yet. But he knows good blackmail material when he sees it - he’s just waiting for the right opportunity.)

“Master Hawkins,” Doppler says after a moment, sounding a little strangled, “er…how attached are you to your brother?”

Jim looks at him in confusion. “Hogarth?” He asks uncertainly. “He’s my kid brother. I’m…really attached.”

“Then I suggest you use the stone _now_ ,” he says, panic creeping into his voice, “before it’s too late!”

He holds the stone up, looks out the window - feels his blood run ice-cold. On the yard, completely unaware, Hogarth is holding a bowl and calling for the stupid cat. In a circle around him, creeping closer, six knee-high monsters size him up. He recognizes them instantly - goblins, the most common of the dangerous fae. “Hogarth!” He cries, slams his palms uselessly against the glass, “Hogarth, run!”

They pounce. Jim watches in silent horror as his brother is knocked to the ground, grabbed by the legs as he thrashes wildly - 

Turning away is hard, but sprinting down the stairs has never been easier in his life. By the time he busts through the front door, the beasts are gone, and his brother is gone with them. With a cry of frustration, he kicks the bottom stair as hard as he can, breathing heavily. Anger fills his head, hot and red and cotton-thick - then drains suddenly with desperate fear and sorrow. This isn’t exactly his _fault_ , but he’s not blameless, either. He should have checked the study for the stone earlier, or kept a closer eye on his brother, or - 

That doesn’t matter now. Uncle Rick is out of the house at work - he can’t help. Probably wouldn’t help unless they tricked him into it, anyway. But Dimitri is home, and he’s in charge until his dad returns. And - for what it’s worth - he’s got swords. Okay, technically, they’re fencing rapiers with rounded tips to keep people from being injured, but Jim’s been forced (literally at knifepoint) to be a training dummy for his cousin. That shit _hurts_ when a strike lands.

Which is why he approaches Dimitri with caution, or at least with his arms up defensively. Mostly, he wants to slap his cousin across the face. If he hadn’t been wearing those stupid headphones, maybe Hogarth wouldn’t be gone.

At his approach, Dimitri swings around, rapier outstretched and almost slicing into Jim’s chin. He leans back involuntarily, makes the universal hand motion for “headphones off”, and waits until his cousin has them hanging from his neck. “Dimitri, please,” he says, “I need your help.”

“Oh, really,” Dimitri pants, trying to sound sarcastic but mostly just sounding out of breath, “so you haven’t talked to me in a week and a half, but now that you need help, we’re buddies?”

Jim sighs. “Look, I’m _sorry_ ,” he says, not feeling very sorry, “but it’s really urgent.”

“Oh, wow. Now I _really_ want to help. You know - “

“Hogarth’s been _kidnapped_ ,” Jim interrupts, “right on the yard, twenty feet from you! And you didn’t even _notice_! I’m _sorry_ that you have a problem with _me_ , but _he needs us_ and _I need you_.”

Dimitri goes sheet-white. “What?” He manages. “What happened? How did you - something took him?”

“Yeah - goblins,” he says, “they’re these ugly little - wait, just look here.” The field guide is never far from hand, and Jim quickly pulls it from his bag and flips to the right page. The illustration alone is enough to shake Dimitri, and Jim can’t blame him - it’s a small, ugly beast, bipedal but only barely, long skinny arms hanging so low to the ground they could be front legs. Fat and froglike with grey-white eyes and jagged, mismatched teeth.

After a moment, Dimitri lets out a shaking sigh. “If that’s what did it, we’d better hurry,” he says, “with eyes like that, they probably see better in the dark than we do.” Jim nods. That’s…actually pretty smart. He resolves to mention it in the guide later. “But how are we supposed to find them? Didn’t you say fae can turn invisible whenever they want? Like Doppler does?”

“Not if you’ve got the Sight. Here.” He holds up the stone. “With this, I can see them no matter what.”

“Is that the thing you’ve been looking for this whole time? Where’d you find it?”

“There was one up in the study.”

Dimitri’s nose wrinkles. “You didn’t look there first?”

Jim scowls and opens his mouth to answers - but at a rustling in the brush, he wheels around, looking desperately through the stone. Nothing. A bird, maybe. He squints, looking for something in the underbrush.

Behind him, Dimitri cries out in pain, and the guide hits the ground with a thud. Jim whirls - through through the stone, he sees one beast hanging off his cousin’s arm - 

Something grabs his leg and pulls. He goes down with a yelp, lands on top of the book. Claws dig into his flesh, and something starts dragging him backwards. The stone falls to the ground, leaving both boys blind. Rapier aloft, Dimitri swings out, stabbing towards the scratches on Jim’s leg. “The stone!” Jim manages, “grab the stone!” Guide in his hands, he strikes something he can’t see, hears it shriek in surprise. One releases him - he feels another leap on his back. Above him, Dimitri swings wildly in an arc, hitting nothing. “Lower, they’re lower - aim below your knees!”

Another arc, lower. Another yelp from an unseen adversary. The weight on his back rolls away, and Jim scrambles to his feet, snatching the stone off the ground.

There’s five of them in all. With one hand, he holds the stone to his eye. The other hefts the guide like a weapon. The cousins stand back to back, knees bent, prepared for a fight. “They’re circling us,” he tells Dimitri, “one of them is injured, but they’re all ready to lunge. You’re twelve, I’m six - seven o’clock!”

Quick as lightning, Dimitri’s blade whips around to slash at the lunging goblin, making sharp contact. He told Jim a while back that he was the second best on his fencing team, and before, Jim made jokes about inadequacy. But if Dimitri’s this fast, his captain must be _insane_. “Three o’clock!” He calls. “Twelve o’clock! Eight! Two! Nine!”

Strike after strike hits true - between yelling locations, Jim hits a beast so hard it goes flying. All in all, it’s maybe two minutes before the first goblin, ear sliced and bleeding, turns and runs for the cover of the trees. The rest of the pack, cowards, aren’t far behind.

“They’re gone,” he says after a moment, breathing hard and offering the stone to Dimitri, “look.”

His cousin takes it and peers through. “Well, I don’t see anything,” he admits, “but I didn’t see anything a minute ago, either.”

Jim points towards the forest. “They went that way,” he says, “their camp is probably that way, too.”

“They have camps?”

“Yeah. Here. Ame- uh- Smollet explains it better than I do.” He hands the book back to Dimitri to read while he reaches into his pocket. He’s having an idea.

“‘Goblins make camp and travel in packs, looking for fights and scavenging for food,’” Dimitri reads aloud as Jim produces the eyepiece from his pocket. As he thought - there’s a slot between slats of leather which fits the stone perfectly. He clamps it in. “Oh, and here - ‘missing house pets, like dogs and cats, are a common sign that goblins are nearby.’”

The boys share a look. “Ping,” Jim says.

Dimitri shakes his head and continues reading as Jim struggles to adjust the headholds. “‘Since goblins are unable to grow their own teeth, they must scavenge to find or make them out of rocks, broken glass, or stolen baby teeth.’ Ew.”

Jim glances at the book - his eyes catch on the illustration’s teeth. He can guess why goblins would want to take cats, but Hogarth is a human boy. There’s no way they’d - that is, they couldn’t really intend to - “Dimitri,” he says, “you don’t think they took Hogarth for - “

Dimitri snaps the book shut loudly. “No, I don’t,” he interrupts, then glances over at Jim. “You don’t have that on tight enough,” he says, more quietly than before, “here, turn around. I’ll tie it on for you.”

Jim turns and lets his cousin tie the apparatus on. The weight of the guide, too, returns to his backpack. “There,” Dimitri says, “now take one of my rapiers and lead the way.”

“Yeah,” Jim agrees, “let’s get Hogarth.”

~~

Nothing happens before they reach the stream. The goblins, fairly stupid at the best of times, have left a freshly trampled path of grass in their wake. Dimitri, pointing it out with his blade, has taken the lead, but the stream stops both of them in their tracks.

“There’s a bridge that way,” Jim says. It’s the first thing either of them has said since leaving the house. “It’s pretty weak, but if we want to cross, we’ve got to use it.”

“Or we could just wade it,” Dimitri says.

“Not possible. I’ve been down here a lot recently, and it’s way too deep.”

“Or maybe you’re just way too short,” he replies, already a foot out. Jim thinks about arguing further, then decides it’ll be funnier when - yup, down he goes. His cousin takes a step and disappears entirely under the water, the green of the stream swallowing him whole.

Jim gives it a moment, then wades out to grab his cousin’s hand as he splutters back to the surface. “Yeah, _I’m_ probably the problem,” he starts to say, totally ready to launch into a bit - except that something else surfaces too. He looks up. And up, and up.

“Oh, shut - what? What is it?” Dimitri looks over his shoulder, unable to see anything but the ripples on the water - Jim pulls him back off the bank desperately.

“Troll,” he manages, “river troll - we gotta go, _now_.” As he speaks, it raises a huge claw and reaches out for them - then jerks back with a hiss. Between them, filtering light dances on the water.

“What happened?”

“I think the sunlight burned it,” Jim says, brow furrowed, “we’d better use that and go now. There’s barely any light left.”

“ _Waaait,_ ” the troll moans softly, “ _you left your swooord. It’s in the waaater._ ” It points - sure enough, Jim’s rapier is glinting in the shallows, on the other side of the beam of light.

“That’s a trick,” Jim says. “We don’t need it, anyway. We’re looking for my brother, Hogarth. Did he come this way? Did you see him?”

The troll frowns. “ _Heeeard somethiiing,_ ” it replies, “ _shooouting and fiiighting some time agooo. Tooooo bright for me to seeeeee._ ”

“That must have been him. Where’d they go?”

Yellow and black beetle eyes size him up. “ _Come clossser,_ ” it says, grinning wickedly, “ _then I’ll tell youuu._ ”

“No way.” Jim steps back, glances at Dimitri, whose eyes are fixed on the rapier. His hands are empty, too - he must have lost his at the bottom of the stream. Jim curses. “We’re _leaving,_ ” he says pointedly.

“It’s the only weapon we have,” Dimitri says. The troll’s eyes flash.

“ _Gooo aheeead,_ ” it groans, “ _pick it uuup. I’ll even close my eyes to make it faaair._ ” It puts a claw over its eyes demonstratively.

“Dimitri, look at it before you make a decision,” Jim snaps, and unclasps the stone. His cousin takes it, peers through it - goes pale and stumbles back.

“Let’s go,” he says shakily.

The boys turn as one and hightail it over the bridge as the troll wails from behind them. “ _Waaait,_ ” it pleads, “ _come baaack. I’ll even count to teeen._ ”

They catch their breath against a tree. Dimitri is shaking, though Jim can’t tell if it’s from the water in the cooling summer air or from seeing the troll. Either way, he takes off his jacket and passes it to his cousin.

“We’re lost,” Dimitri says, wrapping the jacket over his shoulders, “and now we’re unarmed.”

“I know,” Jim says. They’ve lost the trail in the scramble, and they don’t dare return over the bridge to find it again. He stares up into the uneven pattern of leaves above them. “Why didn’t you stand up for us?”

“What?”

“I’m not mad anymore,” Jim admits, “I’m tired of not talking. I just want to know - when I told Rick about the fae, and he dismissed us, you didn’t say anything. But we could prove it. So why?”

He sighs, rests his head against the trunk of the tree. For a moment, it looks like he’s not going to answer - then, “I didn’t want to lose him,” he admits. “He’s my dad. And this stuff - this is all _dangerous_. Maybe my mom could handle it, but not him. And mom’s not coming back.”

“I thought you stayed with her during the year.”

“Yeah, most years. She’s going to Egypt on a dig with state funding this year, and she won’t take me. By the time she gets home, I’ll have graduated.” He crosses his arms defensively. “So I’m not losing dad, too.”

Jim stares at his feet. “I understand,” he says, and he does. Probably better than anyone else his cousin knows.

“Yeah, I figured you would. Sorry I didn’t stand up for you when it counted.”

Jim shifts uncomfortably. He doesn’t want to say _it’s okay_ , because it isn’t, really. But he’s tired of being angry and of Dimitri being angry at him, and he gets it, even if it hurt. He’s used to being left behind and left alone. “Thanks for apologizing,” he settles on, “I appreciate it.”

“So…we cool?”

“Yeah, we’re cool,” Jim says, lets his mouth twitch into an almost smile. It’s something Hogarth would say, and neither of them ever would. He stares out into the darkening wood. It’s funny - he can almost smell - he sniffs the air. “You smell that?”

Dimitri looks in the same direction. “Yeah,” he says, “smells like smoke. And…cooking meat? A campfire, maybe?”

They lock eyes. “Goblins,” Jim says.

“Hogarth,” says his cousin.

~~

They follow their noses, which turns out to be the right decision and spits them out at a patch of clearing close to the highway. Out on the open road, the sunset blazes in purple and orange glory as cars whizz by, oblivious to the camp just a few meters away. There’s a fire roaring in the center of the clearing with some skewered animal on a spit above. It’s surrounded by a small horde of goblins, all staring hungrily at the charred remains being slowly turned. And they, in turn, are surrounded by small mounds of garbage, on the ground and in the trees.

Inching closer, Dimitri and Jim carefully sidestep around piles of broken glass and dried leaves, hurrying from one tree to another, keeping cover between them and the monsters and always looking up. Up in the branches, at the multitude of cages hanging from trees like sinister wind chimes. The cages are of all different sizes - some look like squirrel traps, others like discarded bird feeders - and while some have animals running nervously from one side to the other within, others hold only bones, or nothing at all.

“See anything?” Jim whispers.

“Nothing yet,” Dimitri replies in kind. “How many goblins?”

“About ten, I think,” he says. “They’re all focused on the fire - they keep trying to get bits and pieces off of that…whatever that is.” It looks about cat-sized, but Jim doesn’t want to think about that right now. 

From the forest, a ways off from the camp, there’s a shrill animal cry. Jim startles, then whirls around as silently as he can manage - not so very far from their current location, lain out between two trees, there’s a creature the size of a horse. Bigger, if he counted the enormous wings. White feathers are stained red-brown with blood. Lion’s paws are splayed uselessly in the grass. He shivers.

“What is it?” Dimitri whispers.

“It’s a gryphon,” Jim replies. “Half lion, half eagle, all angry territorial beast. It’s hurt, but it looks pissed - let’s move quickly.”

They hurry past the wounded creature, which gives another pained cry but makes no move to stop them. Jim keeps an eye on it - Dimitri looks up into the branches. “There,” he says, and points upwards, “those look big enough to fit a person in.”

Jim looks up. There, in one of the cages, he sees a moving figure. It’s too far away to get a clear glimpse of, but he doesn’t need one - it has to be Hogarth. “I’ll climb up,” he says, “here, give me a boost.”

Dimitri nods, clasps his hands together and holds them down for Jim to step on. “Be quick,” he says, and pushes him up to a branch.

Jim’s always been a good climber. Be it a humiliating rope test in an underfunded school’s gym class or the mountain ranges near his mother’s home, he’s always had strong hands, a strong will, and no fear of heights. He scrambles up the tree’s branches, realizing as he goes that the canopy of jingling cages is actually made of layers, tiers of food by size. The higher he climbs, the bigger the cages around him get. Below, wrapped in cords of poison ivy, he can see emptied containers of bird shit and squirrels, stolen dog kennels with bones inside of them, a broad array of animal life. Even further down, he hears the goblins bickering in a language he can’t understand, slapping each other’s hands from the fire. Some of them are singing tunelessly.

“Aye, lad, p’raps if yer goin’ t’ sit there all night, you could unlock my cage a’fore you get too contemplative, eh?” Asks an unfamiliar voice. Jim, surrounded by squeaks and creaks of upset birds and rocking cages, is fortunately not startled off his branch. He whips his head back and forth to find the source of the noise.

“What - who are you? Where - “

“Over here, my boy,” says the voice again, and Jim turns to see a creature in one of the larger cages, waving a cheeky hand at him. “Th’ name’s Silver. Chose it m’self, after my sparklin’ personality,” it says, with a smile that seems to be made of baby teeth, “pleasure t’make your acquaintance, eh? Now, if you wouldn’t mind…” it points a finger at the lock on the front of its cage.

Jim squints. “Aren’t you a hobgoblin?” He asks. “Why’d they lock you up? Aren’t you one of them?”

“No need t’ get nasty, lad,” Silver says, looking affronted, “as a matter o’ fact, I’d never take work with any of those oafs unless they signed a contract swearin’ their allegiance to me, and seein’ as not a one of ‘em knows what a contract _is_ , not to mention their crucial inability to write, that’s me out the door before a job’s even started. O’ course, they resent me an’ my superior mind, that’s why I’m up here an’ not down there.”

“That sounds fake,” Jim says, crossing his arms, “I’m not going to let you out until you tell me why you’re _really_ \- “

“Jim!” 

It’s Hogarth. Jim wheels around, catches sight of his brother, sighs in exhausted relief. Hogarth is scratched and dirty, but certainly alive, jam-packed into one of the cages. “Hogarth,” he calls back, “it’s okay, Dimitri and I came to get you.” He starts to make his way across the branches.

“Oi!” Silver cries from behind him, “what about me, eh? You get me out of this cage this instant or I’ll start hollerin’ so loud yer ears’ll have to duck for cover!”

“I’ll let you out in a _minute_ ,” Jim snaps over his shoulder, “I’m getting my brother free first, then I’ll come back for you.”

“I’ll yell, I swear I’ll yell - “

“No, you won’t. If you do, and the goblins come and get me, there’ll be no one to let you free at all. Just _give me a minute._ ” That said, he quickly makes his way over to his brother’s cage. He notes, with some relief, that Silver stays mercifully quiet.

“Hey,” he says gently, pulling out his pocketknife to saw at the ivy wrapped around the lock of his brother’s cage, “I’m here. Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

“No, I’m okay,” Hogarth says. His voice shakes, but only a little bit.

Jim tries to think of what to say, but finds himself coming up blank. “I’m sorry,” he says at last, “I should’ve helped you look for your cat.” The door springs open - Hogarth struggles out, headfirst, then wraps his arms around Jim’s waist and buries his face in his neck.

“’S okay,” he says, muffled into Jim’s shoulder. As he sets a reassuring hand on his back, Jim can feel him shaking.

“Hey, it’s alright,” he murmurs, “we’re just gonna sneak out of here quietly and get home, okay? We’ll be fine.”

“ _After_ you put that knife t’ good use and get _me_ out of here,” Silver interrupts, knocking on the bars of his cage. Hogarth startles and stares blindly into the trees - Jim glares over his brother’s head.

“What’s that?”

“Come on,” Jim says, letting his brother go and crawling back across the branch, “I promised I’d let this guy out after I got you.”

Hogarth is recovering quickly, and tries to peer into the cage as Jim looks for a good way to saw the lock open. The metal’s pretty brittle - maybe he could jam it open. “What’s in there?”

“A hobgoblin, I think.”

“A goblin? Are you _nuts_?”

“No, lad, use yer ears - I’m a _hobgoblin_ ,” Silver says, crossing his arms. He kind of looks like he’s pouting, but that might just be his face. “We’re smarter and wiser and all around more handsome than those little toady abominations. Less crude, too.” He smiles wickedly. “You know, if you’d _like_ ta get a glance of my visage, I’d be more than happy to spit in yer eyes.”

“Gross,” Hogarth says. “Hard pass.”

“It’ll give you the Sight, boy,” he says, “not everyone is so lucky to be offered such a gift from one so dashing and noble as m’self. Of course, if you’d rather go blind…”

“He’s…actually telling the truth,” Jim agrees, “hobgoblin spit is supposed to give you the Sight. Otherwise you just have to be redheaded. Or find fairy bathwater.” He cringes. “I mean…look, I’ll go first and see if it’s true.”

“A true believer, laddie, that’s what I like to see,” Silver says, grinning proudly. He produces a dirty handkerchief from one of the pockets on his (small, but somehow proportionately huge on him) overcoat and spits readily into it. “Here, lad.”

Jim stares at it and considers chickening out, then rubs it quickly in. It stings badly. “That is _so_ nasty,” Hogarth says.

He blinks - takes the eyepiece off and peers down into the camp. Sure enough, without any assistance, the circle of goblins still rings loud and clear. “Hogarth, it works,” he says, and passes the cloth to his brother, who eyes it skeptically but follows suit.

“Told you it would,” Silver says smugly as Hogarth looks around and gasps. “Now, I’ve held up my end of the bargain fair and square, even threw a little present in there for you as well. So why don’t you see about getting this open and gettin’ me out of here.”

“I’m working on it. This lock’s pretty complicated,” Jim says, “what did you even do to get in here? You didn’t tell me before.”

“Fine, I suppose you’re owed a…small explanation,” the hobgoblin says, folds his arms behind his head. “Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ve got a wee soft spot for cats, see? An’ it isn’t on account of how delicious they taste and how good of a cook I am, ‘coz they is and I am, I jus’ think they’re right sweet. Especially when they’re little and sweet and they’ve got one of those little meows. I saw this roving band o’ cutthroats go after a wee little thing with big eyes an’ a heart fulla gold, so I snuck in and freed it from its bonds.” His eye has gone soft and misty, lost in memory - then he blinks and looks back at Jim. “And that’s all there is to ’t,” he adds hurriedly, as though worried this will somehow count against his character.

“Yeah? And what about those teeth?” Jim asks. “You eat babies or something?”

“What is this, a court-marshall?”

“I’m letting you out,” Jim grouses, “I was just wondering what was with the teeth. I’m not stupid. Those _are_ human teeth.”

“Yeah, well. A hobgoblin’s gotta get somethin’ to chew with, doesn’t ‘e?” Silver grins. “As a matter o’ fact, kids got some grand ideas about leavin’ their lost teeth under their pillows, an’ then their mum throws it away to the dump where _anybody_ could grab it if they wanted. It’s not stealin’ if it’s garbage.”

“Actually, it is,” Hogarth says, then stops as a familiar cry rings through the clearing. All three of them look towards the source.

The gryphon, lying askew by the side of the road, is surrounded by four of the ten goblins, all with long handcrafted spears. Each time a goblin dances forward, spear in hand, the gryphon snaps its beak at them, or knocks them away with that enormous wing. One goblin charges forward towards its face - in a flash, the gryphon bites its arm off. From behind, during the distraction, another leaps forward and drives its spear deep into the beast’s back. It roars in pain - the goblins cheer.

“What are they doing?” Hogarth asks, voice trembling.

“What’s it look like they’re doing?” Silver replies, examining his nails. “They’re waitin’ for the beast t’ die. C’mon, lad, get this door loose already.”

“They’re killing it,” Hogarth says, pale and shaking. He stands up in the tree, grabs a handful of loose leaves and sticks, and hurls it down at the creatures. Jim realizes with a start that - other than Doppler - Hogarth has never seen any fae before. He doesn’t know the danger.

“Hogarth, stop!” He hisses, grabs his brother by the leg.

“Leave him alone!” Hogarth yells down, throwing more sticks, “leave him alone! _Get away!_ ”

As one, all four goblins turn to look up into the tree, their shining white eyes glistening in the fresh moonlight as the sun slips away at last. Jim covers his face with a palm, and with one last jam of the knife, the cage door springs open.

Silver bolts out like a bat out of hell, leaping through the branches like a monkey. Below them, all ten goblins converge on the tree, surrounding it and chanting stupidly. Hogarth continues to yell at them, throwing sticks and expletives he isn’t supposed to know in tandem. Jim, eyes flashing wildly back and forth, grabs his brother around the waist, hoists him over his shoulder, and starts clambering through the trees. The going is too slow - as fast as he can get from one branch to another, the goblins can easily keep up underneath, spears and torches waving. It probably won’t be long before one of them gets the idea to light the forest, and then it’ll be all over.

“Over here!” Bellows Silver from far below them. Jim swings his head around to get a look, but the hobgoblin isn’t speaking to them - he’s dancing around the campfire, waving the skewered meat above his head and calling for the horde to turn its attention. “Yes, you, you jiggle-headed, pale-eyed sons of leper’s donkeys! Go boil your heads, you stark-raving, totally bleedin’ daft-brained, sniveling cowardly little - “

It works. The boys ought to be thankful for that as the goblins, initially crowding their spot of trees, begin to fan out and approach Silver, who pisses on the fire until the blaze burns green. Jim turns away, back towards his original rendezvous point. “Dimitri!” He calls down. “I got Hogarth! Here, take this.” He throws the eyepiece down.

“Got it,” Dimitri calls back up, “now hurry up and get down here. The goblins were just here, I heard them, they almost saw me.”

Hogarth scrambles down until he’s ten feet off the ground, then jumps into his cousin’s arms. Jim, who has no such ideas about being caught, just sticks the landing. “We gotta go,” he says, breathing hard, “they turned on the hobgoblin but they’ll be back for us soon. We should get as much of a head start as we can.”

“But what about all the other animals?” Hogarth is staring wide-eyed up at the canopy in all its squeaking, skittering glory. “We can’t just leave them here. They’ll get eaten if we go.”

“Yeah, and _we’ll_ get eaten if we stay,” Dimitri says, “come on, it looks like they’re turning around now.”

Despite Hogarth’s protests, Jim and Dimitri each take one of his hands and bolt, tugging him along behind them. They just have to follow their own trail, all the way back through the forest. And they’ve got to go…

Over the bridge.

The river troll looms over them, its enormous hands crossed on the bridge to prevent passage. There’s no way around it. “ _Looooook at thiiis,_ ” it says, grinning, “ _threeeee little boysss, aaall in a rushhh. Ran toooo fast before…won’t let you run so fast nooow._ ” Hogarth turns, tries to scramble back to the bank, but another hand comes down and blocks the way back. “ _Deeear meee. Such bad maaanners. I think I’ll eat you fiiirst._ ”

“Wait,” Jim says, waving his hands, “don’t eat us. There’s more food coming.” The troll peers down at him in confusion, but doesn’t pick his brother up to eat, which is as good a sign as any. “There’s ten goblins chasing us,” he explains, words tripping over one another, “but they won’t cross the bridge if you eat us. If you let us go, there’ll be more to eat. Otherwise there’s just us, and we’re all skinny.”

“Nothing but bones,” Dimitri agrees shakily.

“Goblins are really fat,” Hogarth adds.

The river troll seems to consider this, turning its head one way and then another. Then, smiling, it lifts its hands up and sinks silently into the stream. The boys look at one another, then run, hearts pounding, listening as the crowd of footprints grow closer and closer. Then a splash - the cracking of splintering wood - screaming - silence.

~~

They trudge back twenty minutes later, tired and dirty, twigs in their hair and sleep on their minds. Jim didn’t want to come back at all - Dimitri didn’t really want to, either. But Hogarth did, and he’d been through enough that day that the older two boys figured, what the hell, he kind of deserved it. Even if his plan was the dumbest thing ever, and involved Dimitri carrying the huge blue tarp from the carriage house.

“Look,” he was saying, “I get all the other animals - the squirrels and cats and stuff - but Hogarth, do we _really_ have to get the gryphon, too? It’s huge and it looks dangerous. Where are we even going to put it?”

“He’s _hurt,_ ” Hogarth says, scowling, “he needs to be rehabilitated. Besides, we’ll put him in the carriage house. Jim was just cleaning it out this afternoon. There’s plenty of space in there now.”

Jim has long since learned not to argue with his brother, and quickly tunes Dimitri’s response out. When they reach the camp, he approaches the fire, where the hobgoblin is still sitting, eating a cat off a skewer and grinning hugely. “Hey,” he says, “my brother wants to free all the animals, so…I guess we’ll be here for a while. Mind if I…?” He trails off, gestures at one of the makeshift seats around the fire. Silver laughs.

“Go ahead, lad, make yourself at home,” he says. “What’d you say your name was, again?”

“I didn’t,” Jim says. He knows he isn’t supposed to say his name to any fae - names have power, and sharing your own was giving out a weakness - but he only goes by a nickname, anyway, so he figures it’s alright. “It’s Jim. That’s what my brother calls me, anyway.”

“Well then, Jimbo,” Silver says, and grins, “I didn’t get the chance to thank you for before, what with you havin’ rescued me and all. Just know that, given that you saved my life and also kept me from gettin’ an awful cramp in my one remaining leg, I owe you a debt of gratitude and, er, whatnot.”

“Thanks,” Jim says awkwardly, “but you don’t have to do that.”

“Unfortunately, I do,” Silver says, “it’s a fae folk thing. Veeery big on repaying debts by a hundredfold, we are. Collecting on ‘em, too.” He pokes the fire with a stick. “You hungry? I’m cooking up a rabbit now, if you’d like.”

“No thanks, I’m good,” Jim says, though his stomach is empty and growling intermittently, “Hogarth’d kill me if he knew.” He stares into the fire and listens to the hobgoblin hum a tune he doesn’t know. “Silver,” he says after a pause, “why are goblins so…evil?”

“They’re not evil, Jimbo,” Silver says, “they’re too stupid to be evil. Nah, they’re just animals, hunting an’ killing an’ making a mess for the rest of us. Just a little more dangerous on account of their prey not bein’ able to see them until it’s too late - but I suppose you could say the same for owls or tigers or other what-have-yous.”

“Do evil fae exist?”

Silver doesn’t reply for a long time - just stares into the fire, its light flickering back off his glass eye. “Aye,” he says, softer than before, “there’s evil fae just like there’s evil humans. And any fae clever enough to know right from wrong is dangerous, and any fae that chooses wrong when he knows it ain’t right can’t be stopped.” The fire cracks and spits. Above them, Dimitri and Hogarth holler to each other from the branches. Jim watches Silver with rapt fascination.

“Silver?” He asks at last.

“Beware of the ogre,” Silver says, and shakes his head, “beware of Imhotep. He has many forms and many eyes. He has died many times, and each time risen from the dead he grows stronger.” Shadows dance around them. “Go on home, Jimbo,” he says, “I have a feeling we’ll be meeting again very soon.”

~~

The tarp is for the gryphon. It’s a terrible idea, as Dimitri has pointed out a number of times, but as Hogarth has replied just as often, they don’t have a better one. So the tarp it’ll have to be. Jim shakes his head indulgently and helps unfold it on the ground by the fallen beast, while Hogarth strokes the gryphon’s beak and murmurs quiet encouragements to it. It seems to be calm when he speaks to it - that’s worth something, at least.

“Alright,” Dimitri says as the three boys huddle up, “it’ll be like raking leaves, right? We hold the tarp in place with our feet and roll the - eagle - lion thing on in one movement, okay?”

“It’s a gryphon,” Hogarth says impatiently.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dimitri says, “don’t be smarmy just because you guys got spit in your eyes, okay?”

“You know, I’d be just as happy to spit in yours as well,” Silver calls from his new seat under a tree. He seems to be enjoying the show immensely.

“You really should do it,” Jim says, “it’ll mean you don’t have to use the eyepiece anymore. It’s a convenience thing.”

“Sure, says you,” Dimitri says, crossing his arms. “How long is that spit even going to last, anyway? Did you think about that?”

Jim hadn’t. He glances to Silver for an answer. “Until somebody pokes your eyes out,” Silver says smugly.

“C’mon, Dimitri,” Hogarth says. “Do it! Do-it, do-it, do-it…” He starts pumping his fist and chanting encouragement. Dimitri shakes his head and rolls his eyes.

“Fine,” he says, throws his arms in the air, “do your worst, you furry little nightmare.” He bends down on one knee. Silver spits directly into his eyes with more relish than is really necessary. 

“There you are, you ungrateful wench,” Silver says, “so long, kiddos.”

“See you around, Silver,” Jim says, and goes to check the time on his phone. It’s dead, big surprise. “Come on, can we just get the gryphon and go now? It’s super late, I’m tired, and uncle Rick is going to be super pissed as it is that we were out all night.”

“Alright, alright, fine,” Dimitri says, and gets back in position. “On three. Ready? One…two…”

They flip the gryphon onto the tarp. It flails and squawks, beating its huge wings against the ground, but by the time it’s making purchase on anything, it’s already on the tarp. “Great,” Jim says, “let’s go.”

They pick the tarp up like a stretcher - Dimitri at the beast’s head, Jim by its back paws - and, with great effort, begin to drag the creature back the way they came. It’s a long walk, and the gryphon dislikes it immensely - it’s so heavy that neither of them can pick it up very far off the ground, and it keeps being bumped and jostled by the roots and rocks of the forest. Every few minutes they have to stop and set the tarp down so Hogarth can stroke the beast’s head and whisper calmly to it, ruffling its feathers endearingly until it relaxes enough to let them carry it further. It probably takes them half an hour to get it all the way back to the house and slid into the carriage house.

Jim winces as he sees the lights in the kitchen on and the car in the driveway. They are in _so_ much trouble when they get inside.

Hogarth sets about with bandaging the gryphon’s wounded wing. Jim, trying to make himself busy and knowing full well none of them can return to the house without the other two, finds a large porcelain bowl for a long-dead potted plant and fills it with whatever scrap metal he can. Old nails, nuts and bolts, gears, even the old crowbar he’d been using earlier that day. They could get another one - no big deal. Across the room, Dimitri finds a large, moth-eaten horse blanket and carefully drapes it over the creature. When Jim puts the bowl in front of it, it eats quickly and graciously. He isn’t going to admit it to his brother - probably ever - but the gryphon is…kind of cute right now. He feels a certain endearment to it that he can’t quite explain.

“Well…” Dimitri says, when the gryphon lays its head on the old, soft hay they found in the stables portion of the carriage house, “I guess there’s no more delaying it. Let’s get inside.”

~~

Jim looks from his cousin to his brother and back. The state of things is less than ideal - Dimitri is still waterlogged and shivering from his unintentional dip in the river, his hair clogged with sticks and leaves, and Hogarth’s clothes are torn almost to pieces, his jacket bearing a few unpleasantly deep gashes and one of his shoes barely in a single piece. For his own part, Jim’s pants are dyed green at the knees from grass and stained red-brown from small cuts. All three of them are muddied and exhausted. They are also, Jim notes, all alive. They still have the monocle and they still have the field guide. In his book, that has to count for something.

Their uncle is on the phone when they get in, and whirls around to face them as the door shuts behind them. His face is blotchy and red, as though he was crying. “They’re here,” he says to whoever’s on the other end of the phone, “they just got home - thank you so much - “

He hangs up, and whirls around to face them. No one speaks for a moment. “Where the _hell_ were the three of you?” He snaps after a moment. “It is _one thirty in the morning!_ Do you three have any idea what you put me through?” He jabs a shaking finger at Dimitri. “How could you be so irresponsible?” He says. “I put you in charge of these two! What do any of you have to say for yourselves?”

Dimitri looks at Jim. Jim looks at Hogarth. Hogarth looks at Dimitri, then back at Jim. They’re waiting, he realizes, for him to come up with an excuse. His eyes flail around helplessly for a moment, then fix on his brother’s hands, where he’s cradling one of the cats they rescued that evening. “Um…well, Hogarth saw…a cat,” he starts lamely, “that cat.” He glances at his brother, who nods encouragingly. “And, uh…he wanted it, so he chased it…up a tree. But he got stuck, so I went back home to get Dimitri.”

“Right,” Dimitri agrees blindly, “and I tried to climb up the tree after him to get him down. But the cat ran off into the forest, so Hogarth chased it.”

“Yup,” Hogarth says, “when they got me down, I chased it into the woods. And the bridge broke when we crossed it, and Dimitri fell into the stream.”

“Right. And the cat climbed up another tree, and I got it down, and then we came home,” Jim finishes. The three of them stare hopefully at Rick. It’s the only thing they can do.

Rick stares into their eyes and shakes his head. “All three of you are grounded for the next month,” he says after a moment, “no TV, and no going outside when I’m not home. Now get upstairs and get into bed right now.”

They trudge upstairs, feeling dejected. “Jim, can I stay in your room tonight?” Hogarth says, once Dimitri has waved them goodnight and peeled off to bed himself. “I’m scared.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jim says. “Why were those things after us? Goblins aren’t supposed to hunt humans normally, not even kids.” He kicks his shoes off and sits on the edge of the bed, staring around his room as Hogarth tugs off his jacket and sneakers. “Doppler?” He calls. “You in here?”

No answer. Jim sighs and falls backwards into bed, rubbing his temples. Every part of his body is sore, but his mind is wide awake. Hogarth, not similarly troubled, switches off the light and wriggles into bed next to his brother. Jim checks on him five minutes later - he’s out cold.

Jim’s so close to being out, too, when he hears Doppler’s voice in the dark. “It’s the book,” he says, “they want the book.”

END OF CHAPTER TWO.


	3. Arrow's Secret

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! This is a longer chapter than the first two. It also comes with a more emphatic warning about animal death than the first one. Watch your mental health, guys, because plot is starting to broil up.
> 
> Also, there's some of my OCs in here. They're not plot-relevant enough to get tagged - I just don't want to stump you guys, making you try to figure out who they're supposed to be. Don't worry about it! They're not that important.

Jim sits in his room, a cheap calendar open on his lap. His birthday’s coming up soon, which means his mom (and, by extension, her girlfriend Annie, too) is driving up to Maine to come visit. July 27th is a Saturday this year - if he’s lucky, uncle Rick might forget that he’s still supposed to be grounded then. Hogarth’s certainly gotten off light before - feeding his cats at the back door and climbing trees in the backyard. And Rick’s turned the other way for Jim a couple times ever since he suggested taking the trash from the carriage house to Dean’s place alone. Dimitri’s just been sneaking out. Hogarth says, mockingly, that he has a girlfriend, which Jim _wouldn’t_ believe if Dimitri didn’t get red and defensive every time.

He’s got to make things up with Doppler by that time. As per usual with the brownie, Jim has absolutely no idea what he’s done wrong, but Doppler’s been putting him on ice ever since the night of the goblin attack. Things have only gotten weirder since then - with the Sight in his eyes at all times, he’s seen more and more outside that he can’t explain. Dust clouds of sprites far away in the forest, shining voices whispering to him from faraway at night.

And, well, it’s not that he’s totally stupid. He knows - at least, kind of knows - why Doppler’s upset. That night, after Hogarth had fallen asleep, the doctor had tried to convince Jim to give the field guide over, to get rid of it or hide it or burn it. When Jim had staunchly refused, Doppler had flown into a rage, halted only when Hogarth stirred in a nightmare. But that had been two weeks ago, and Jim apologizes every day. He leaves the milk in the study for the brownie, too. He can’t imagine Doppler’s still holding a grudge. But then, he can’t think of why the brownie would be upset about the book in the first place. It’s just a stupid field guide - no one he’s ever shown it to has taken it seriously. It looks like a kid’s book or something.

Well, whatever. He snaps the calendar shut - clearly he’s not going to get any planning done now - and swings his legs over the side of the bed. Might as well see what Dimitri and Hogarth are up to downstairs. When he steps towards the door, he trips and lands on his face. In the time it took to collect his thoughts, something had tied his shoelaces together.

~~

When he emerges into the kitchen, rubbing his nose uncomfortably and hoisting the book under one arm, Dimitri and Hogarth aren’t making a lot of noise. His brother is at the kitchen table, picking through nails and plinking them one by one into a ceramic bowl, while their cousin is standing by the window with a glass of water, holding it up to the light. They both turn to greet him.

“Hey, Hawkins,” Dimitri says, and passes him the glass, “drink this.”

Jim blinks, squints uncertainly at the water and back at Dimitri. “Why? What’d you do, spit in it?”

“Just do it.”

He looks uncertainly at his brother, who shrugs, then takes the plunge. And _immediately_ spits it out. It burns like acid - he feels his tongue going numb just from a second of contact. “Christ!” He yelps, scrubbing helplessly at his mouth with a shirtsleeve, “what the hell was that?”

“The tap water,” Dimitri says, taking the glass back, “it all tastes like that. Upstairs, downstairs, showers, sinks…”

“Yeah, but why did _I_ have to _drink_ it?”

“Both of us did,” Hogarth says, shrugging apologetically when Jim shoots him a look of utter betrayal.

“Plus, I really wanted to see the look on your face,” Dimitri adds. “Speaking of your ugly mug, what’s the deal with your nose?”

Jim sighs and sits at the table across from his brother. “Doppler again,” he admits. “I don’t know why he hates me so much now.”

“I do,” Dimitri replies, “he wants that stupid book. Why don’t you just give it to him? I bet you’ve got the whole thing memorized by now.”

“I don’t. And anyway, that’s not the point. The field guide’s mine. I found it, I’m keeping it. Doppler shouldn’t get to dictate what we do.”

“Listen to you. You sound like Gollum or something! In case you don’t remember, that book is the reason we’re in all this trouble in the first place.”

“The field guide has been _protecting_ us! It showed us about the Sight. It’s the reason we were able to rescue Hogarth at all.”

“ _And_ it’s the reason he got snatched in the first place!”

“Guys, stop,” Hogarth interjects, and Jim startles - somehow, he’d started yelling. “I think the guide is really helpful and important.” Jim swells in triumph. “But…it’s true that it’s dangerous, too. What if goblins attacked us again? What if they got in the house or grabbed uncle Rick or something?”

Jim scowls. “So you want to get rid of it, too? Give up al this magic? Set your gryphon free and forget all of this ever happened?” He stares pointedly at the bowl of cheap metal.

Hogarth stares out the window towards the carriage house. “We can’t let Giant go yet. He’s not all-the-way better.”

“The _point_ is,” Dimitri snaps, “we don’t know enough about the book. It could get us all killed.”

Jim opens his mouth to argue, then shuts it, thinking intensely. He doesn’t care so much about convincing the other boys right now - Dimitri is as stubborn as he is, and Hogarth has better reasons than most to be afraid - he just needs to buy himself some time to figure out what to do. “We know someone who _would_ have more information, though, right?” He says, and smiles at their looks of confusion. “Think uncle Rick knows how to visit crazy Arrow?”

~~

“This is dumb,” Dimitri complains from the front seat of the car. Jim kicks him.

“Well, I think it’s a great idea,” Rick says, “no one’s thought to give uncle Arrow a visit in years. I’m sure he’ll be really thrilled to finally have guests. And baked goods - that’s a nice touch.”

“It’s not like they made anything,” Dimitri says, “they just arranged some frozen dough on a tray.”

“Well, that’s more than what _you_ did,” he replies, “you’re still grounded, young man. You’ve got two weeks left."

Dimitri slumps lower in his seat, ears going pink. “I was at fencing practice,” he grumbles. He looks…embarrassed. Jim squints.

“More like hanging out with your _girlfriend_ ,” Hogarth teases, grinning madly. Dimitri glares into the backseat, twists around to reach out and grab at him, but his seatbelt holds him in place. Just out of reach and ergo in relative safety, the two brothers in the back snicker at his expense.

“Shut _up,_ ” Dimitri hisses.

“All of you, knock it off,” Rick snaps, grabbing his son by the shoulder and pulling him into a respectable sitting position, “we’re here.”

The hospital looks more like some kind of prim, Victorian schoolhouse for rich kids than Arkham Asylum. Jim’s never actually…been to a crazy shack before, for obvious reasons, but he always figured they’d be, um, shittier. But nope - it’s a clean, red brick building, with a high bell tower and so-picturesque-it-had-to-be-cultivated ivy climbing up the side. It’s not weird at all. Which is weird.

Inside, it kind of looks like a normal hospital, and the sign-in desk is in a room that looks like a normal waiting room - tacky carpet, pale blue walls, framed paintings of boring landscapes, that kind of thing. While Rick signs them in as visitors, showing his I.D. and whatever else he has to do, Jim cautiously sits down at the least occupied of the couches. The girl sitting there is about his age, with a shock of pink hair, no shoes, and a sketchbook. She smiles at him vaguely. “Hello,” she says, “first time visiting?”

“Uh, yeah,” he replies nervously. She’s kind of cute, which only makes him more antsy. He was never any good with girls. “Are you, uh, visiting anyone?”

She laughs. “Oh, no, I’m staying here,” she says, and giggles when he startles back. “Don’t worry, I’m not dangerous. Most people aren’t, you know. Who are you here to see?”

“Arrow Smollet? You know him?”

Her eyebrows furrow as though in deep thought - then shakes her head apologetically. “Sorry, I only really know the fifteen-to-twenty patients,” she admits, “I hope everything goes well for you, though. Just treat it like a normal hospital and it won’t seem so weird.”

“Sure.” Jim glances back at Rick, who’s still being processed at the front desk. Dimitri and Hogarth are wrapped up in some conversation by the door, trying their best to remain quiet and failing in several aspects. He shakes his head, smiling, and glances back at the girl on the couch. She doesn’t really look like a mental patient. Sure, she’s not wearing any shoes, but she’s got normal clothes on, not a hospital gown or whatever. Actually, as he looks around the waiting room, around the couches and chairs, amid the mix of people reading or doing puzzles, there’s two more barefooted people - a gauntly pale blonde man focusing on a rubix cube with hereto unknown intensity, and a redheaded woman with too much eye makeup glowering at one of the landscape paintings like she’s trying to shatter the frame with her mind. He suddenly remembers that red hair, if natural, is one of the causes of the Sight, and thinks of her sympathetically.

He looks back at the girl on the couch with him, trying to think of something clever or appreciative to say about what she’s drawing (for the sketch on her paper looks quite skilled), but as he opens his mouth, Dimitri calls to him in a less than pleasant fashion. “Right, coming,” he mutters, then glances back. “Thank you,” he adds awkwardly. The girl nods and smiles, but says nothing else, and after a moment, he turns his back on her and follows his brothers.

Er, his cousin and his brother. Not brothers - obviously, Dimitri isn’t his brother. Obviously.

The nurse who leads them through the hallways chats amiably with uncle Rick at the front of the pack - Jim falls behind between the boys. “Nice moves,” Dimitri says, grinning, “was that you flirting? Man, you in high school is going to be hysterical.”

“I _am_ in high school,” Jim replies moodily, “anyway, I was just trying to ask about the hospital. Taking more initiative than you, anyway.” He shifts his backpack on his shoulder - Hogarth eyes him with distrust.

“Jim, don’t get a girlfriend,” he says, “I only have enough jokes to tease one of you, and depriving either of you of the full brunt of my comic wit is gonna kill me. Inside, where it hurts the most.”

“I’m not getting a girlfriend, Hogarth. You know, _sometimes_ guys can talk to girls and _not_ be trying to flirt with them.”

“Yeah, because that’s what _you_ were trying to do. Uh-huh. Sure.” Dimitri is looking very pleased with himself. Jim scowls - if his cousin doesn’t shut his mouth pretty soon, he’s going to be walking straight into a hurricane of questions about _his_ very real girlfriend who uncle Rick _doesn’t_ and _isn’t supposed to_ know about. He tries to communicate all this with his eyebrows, but instead, he just kind of looks loopy.

“This is his room,” the nurse says from the front of the pack, and Jim looks towards her in surprise, “I’m just going to let him know you’re here - Mr. Smollet? You have visitors,” she says, poking her head through the door. Hogarth grips the plate of cookies in his hands a little tighter.

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” he whispers.

“It’ll be fine,” Jim whispers back reassuringly, “it’s just like a normal hospital. Anyway, he probably isn’t really…” he trails off. He wants to say _’crazy’_ , but somehow he feels guilty using that word in this building. Before he can find a suitable alternative, the nurse smiles genially and pushes the door open, gesturing with another arm for them to come in.

There are two pieces of furniture in the room - a bed with off-white covers in the corner, and a dark-oak wardrobe across the room, its top cluttered with old photographs and strange wooden tchotchkes. Other than that, the only thing of notice is the set of large glass doors opening onto a balcony and letting light stream through into the pale blue room - and, of course, crazy Arrow himself, sitting in a wheelchair by the open doors, staring contentedly out into the garden.

He’s…larger than Jim had always imagined. Broad-shouldered, taller than Hogarth even when seated (and almost taller than Jim). As he turns to look at them, his eyes dart from once face to another, dark and intelligent, set in a strongly-featured face, as though chiseled into some hard rock. He was probably pretty handsome when he was young, but age has withered him slightly, lost him his teeth and his understanding. 

“Uncle Arrow,” Rick says, smiling carefully, as though grinning with too much force might somehow damage him, “do you remember me? I’m Rick O’Connell - and this is my son Dimitri, and my two nephews, Jim and Hogarth. We’re staying in your old house.”

Arrow observes them with a distant sort of interest. “Of course,” he says, voice like a pitcher full of gravel, “Rose’s son. There was also your younger brother. Leeland. You’re much older than I remembered, of course…” he trails off, looking distant. Rick’s face falls for a moment before fixing itself, hiding the concern this comment has given him. “You should not be in the house. I was very clear - it is not safe to live in.”

“I had a construction team come through earlier this Spring,” Rick replies in earnest, “they’ve done repair work on all the stairs and on the skeleton of the house.”

“No, it’s not enough. It’s impossible - it’s impossible.” 

Rick exchanges a nervous look with the nurse. “Would you boys excuse me for a moment?” He says, giving Dimitri a meaningful look, “I just need to step outside quickly.” He moves towards the door - as it closes, Jim catches the quiet phrase “I didn’t realize it had progressed so - “ before it clicks shut.

They’d better move fast.

“Uncle Arrow,” he says, stepping forward, “the construction isn’t why the house isn’t safe, right? It’s something else.”

“Uh, that’s fairies. Just to be clear,” Dimitri adds, glancing cautiously at the door, “we’ve seen them, it’s okay. We know everything.”

“Well, okay, no, we don’t,” Jim hurriedly corrects, “we actually have a lot of questions. There’s a lot we don’t know. We were hoping you could help.”

“Also, we brought cookies,” Hogarth adds, holding the plate up helpfully. Arrow looks between the three boys, almost overwhelmed - then he laughs, deep and low.

“From the top,” he says, “it _is_ fairies I was worried about - I’ll try to help you three in any way I can - and thank you, but unfortunately, I can’t eat those.”

Jim says “what do you mean, you ‘can’t eat them’?” As his brother, simultaneously, says “more for me, then.” Dimitri rolls his eyes.

Arrow sighs. “All things in time,” he says, “first, tell me who and what you’ve seen that would lead you to me.”

“Well, we know Doppler,” Jim starts, counting off on his fingers, “and we ran into some goblins, and there was this weird hobgoblin who spit in our eyes, and we found a gryphon. And - that’s it, right?”

“Oh, Delbert Doppler,” Arrow says, dark eyes shining as though remembering something particularly pleasant, “the constant companion of my youth - one of my closest friends. How pleasant to hear he is still well. When you return, you must return those to him.” He points a steady finger at the top of the wardrobe, identifying a small velvety black bag. Dimitri picks it up and peers into it inquisitively as Arrow talks. “A set of ball and jacks - from my childhood. They were mine, but he loved them more than I ever did. I know he must have been heartbroken to be alone in that empty house - thank goodness for you three. He must be so happy to have company at last.”

Jim thinks about his cross-tied shoelaces this morning, and his brother’s frozen tadpoles that horrible first week. Doppler felt something about them being there, all right, but it certainly wasn’t any kind of happiness. He doesn’t voice this, though - Arrow looks like he’s got one foot in the grave already, and there’s no reason to give him any grief on his choice of companionship in his very, _very_ distant childhood. Instead, he chooses an easier question to start the conversation. “So Amelia Smollet was your mom, right?”

“That she was,” Arrow sighs, “you’ve seen her paintings around the house, have you?” The boys nod. “She was quite an artist. A woman of a stern and militaristic disposition, my father always said. A soldier, an educator, an academic - truly a jack of all trades. When she left, we were left in a financial lurch.”

Jim feels like he’s been slapped. “She left you?”

He nods. “Walked out one day. Took some papers, a notebook - told my father and I she was going out to the woods beyond the wheat fields to do some sketches. Never came back. My father always said he knew, in retrospect, it was too good to last. Said he knew she was leaving for a long time.”

He wants to sit down on the bed in shock, then looks at his brother, who’s staring intently into the cookie in his hand like he could bore a hole into it with his eyes if he wanted it enough. He puts a hand around Hogarth’s back, squeezes his shoulder. “We get it,” he says quietly, “our dad left, too.”

Arrow nods, but doesn’t respond - his gaze flickers back to the window, looking more distant by the second. Jim thinks about the field guide in his bag. Amelia wrote with such character, with such intensity and vivacity and personality, that he’d just liked her without ever thinking what she was like as a person. But if she was the kind of person who left her family for no reason - he doesn’t like her at _all._

Dimitri breaks the silence, clearly uncomfortable, alien to the shared sorrow in the room and blindsided by the affect it's having on their great-uncle even now. “Uncle Arrow, no offense, but why are you in this hospital? You’re not crazy,” he says, and there’s that word again - Jim flinches as he says it, turns to glare - but Arrow is startled out of his reverie, and he laughs, and Jim feels his anger melt away.

“Well, that’s a longer story,” he admits, “spanning most of my childhood, I’ll admit. Like my mother, I was born with the Sight, but my sister Rose was not - and anyway, she was sent to a girl’s boarding school when we were young, and never spent too much time in the house. I tried to tell her about Doppler and the other fae, but she never listened to me. She just told me I had an ‘imagination’, encouraged me to go into writing _novels_.” He makes a face and shakes his head. It’s clear that having an imagination is a fate worse than death to him. “When father died, I was left alone in the house. I had inherited it, of course, and I had money for repairs, but…the fae thought I had the book. My mother’s field guide.” Jim opens his mouth to tell Arrow that they have the field guide, then thinks better of it, takes a cookie to avoid speaking out of turn. Their great-uncle is too lost in thought to be interrupted, anyway.

“Things would attack me in the night when I tried to sleep. They would hold me down and scratch me, or trip me at the stairs, hoping I might fall down them, I expect. Even with the Sight, some of them could hide themselves from my eyes. Most insidious, though, the food they fed me.” He looks back out towards the balcony. “It wasn’t even a trick - at least, not an intentional one. Sprites are rarely aggressive fairies. They just offered me some of their food. The most delicious thing I had ever tasted.” He closes his eyes. “Of course, if you know the first thing about fairies, you know never to accept their gifts. Especially not their fruit. Once I ate it, of course, I could never eat the food of mortals again. It turned to ash in my mouth, to water in my stomach. It could not sustain me. If it had not been for the continuing charity of the sprites, I would surely have starved to death.”

“The ‘continuing charity’?” Dimitri asks. 

Arrow glances up, as though he had forgotten he had company, then smiles. “How rude of me,” he says, “come meet my friends.” With that, he flicks the locks bracing against the wheels of his chair and expertly maneuvers himself out onto the balcony. “Come out, then,” he says to the flower boxes lining the railings, “come meet my nephews - there, don’t be shy.”

Like buds unfurling in the Spring rain, from the different sprouts, small creatures no larger than walnuts appear - not exactly revealing themselves, but suddenly there, as though they had been there on the edge of vision all the time. Jim blinks - sprites, the epitome of fairy beauty, the type of creatures that appeared in watercolor books of poetry for little girls. They looked almost like living flowers, human but somehow ethereal, green or red or tawny-brown skinned, the color of stems springing up from the earth, lithe and elegant, with two sets of transparent wings affixed to their backs, buzzing like dragonflies skimming across water. They flutter up into the air, humming sweet birdlike tunes and swarming around their great-uncle. A few of them are carrying - with immense difficulty - berries almost as large as their own bodies, dropping them into Arrow’s waiting palm.

“But I still don’t understand,” Dimitri says, “who put you here - in the hospital - or _why_.”

“Oh, yes,” Arrow says, frowning as he pops a berry into his mouth and chews thoughtfully - a brief flicker of divine pleasure flashes in his eyes. “The hospital. Well, my sister came to visit me one autumn - she had worried for many years about my mental health, you understand. The ravings about a dangerous house, about fairies - she had reason enough. And then she saw the scratches from those monsters…she thought I was cutting myself. It was enough to concern her that severely.”

Jim isn’t quite paying attention anymore - one of the sprites has approaches him and is smiling prettily - then, it flickers over to his brother, who watches in rapt fascination. In its small hands, it carries a fruit, shining and glossy red. At its quiet urging, Hogarth holds a palm up, hypnotized by its movements. “For you,” it buzzes, smiling. Hogarth’s eyes drift to the fruit in his hand. He stares hungrily at it.

“Hogarth - “ Jim says warningly.

“I won’t,” he replies automatically, “I wonder if I could just taste - “

Without another hesitation, Jim slaps his brother’s hand, jarring the fruit out of it and onto the ground, where it rolls off the balcony and down into the brushes. Hogarth sputters indignantly, then blinks, looking startled and confused. “What just happened?” He asks.

Jim scowls at the sprite floating in the air, raises a hand to swat it down, but is stopped by Arrow’s quick interruption. “Be so kind as to leave her alone,” he says, with stern, absolute authority. Reluctantly, Jim’s hand lowers. “It isn’t their fault - they don’t understand what it does to us. To them, it’s just food.”

He sighs, shakes his head. “I know,” he admits, “they’re not evil. Fairies aren’t evil.”

“But they _are_ dangerous,” Arrow insists, “which is why I must now insist - you _must_ get out of the house. The goblins are only a start - if they think you have the field guide, they’ll never stop until they get what they want. They won’t believe that you don’t have it - the only way out is to run.”

“But we _do_ have the field guide,” Hogarth says, still looking puzzled, like a carpet’s just been pulled out from under him.

Arrow, for his part, looks like he’s been doused in cold water. “You _what?_ ” He cries, composure slipping away from him, “tell me you didn’t - “

“We didn’t leave it at the house,” Jim assures him hurriedly, “look, I followed the clues - your mother left clues in her study to the location of the book - “

“You’ve got to get out,” Arrow says, bracing himself against the armrests of his chair, “you can’t stay in that house a moment longer.”

“No, it’s alright, it’s right here,” Jim says, unzips his backpack and pulls the book out from where it lies, wrapped in a dishtowel. But as he hurriedly pulls the cloth off of it, he finds himself looking at the wrong book. _’The Best Recipe: by the Editors of Cook’s Illustrated’_ , reads the cover in bright orange letters. Jim stares at it in shock, then stares at his cousin, then puts two and two together, face knitting together in rage. “You! You took it!” He shouts, and rears his arm back.

~~

In the backseat of the car, Jim presses his face against the cold glass of the window, trying not to cry. The anger had left him as soon as the nurse and uncle Rick had rushed into the hospital room, leaving only his shame seeping through him. He’d completely lost control. Just like his dad always did.

He hadn’t actually hit Dimitri - Hogarth had grabbed one of his arms so quickly to hold him back that it must have been a leftover reflex from every fight he’d ever tried to stop. But Dimitri had called him crazy and various, less-repeatable things, and the sudden violence had startled Arrow into such a state of upset, they all had to be removed from the room. Not that uncle Rick was particularly keen on staying - he’d spent the first half of the drive giving a wholly unnecessary dressing-down to each of the boys, and the second half in stony silence. Which was fine by Jim. That was what he was used to, anyway.

Hogarth taps Jim on the elbow. “Leave me alone,” Jim mutters.

He taps again, undeterred. “Jim,” he whispers, “maybe Doppler took it?”

Jim startles and turns to look at his brother, unable to deny the wetness in his own eyes when he blinks. Now that Hogarth says it out loud, it seems obvious, almost embarrassingly so. Of course Doppler took it - he’d been trying to get it for weeks, and Jim had left it unattended in his backpack earlier that day. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Why hadn’t he just _stopped_ to ask Dimitri before trying to punch him? Why did he have to lose control _every time_ he got angry?

When they get home, he doesn’t go inside right away - instead, he sits miserably on the steps of the front porch. After a few minutes, Dimitri returns, and quietly sits next to him. “I didn’t take the book,” he says, “I believed you before. You need to believe me now.”

“I do,” Jim replies miserably, “Doppler probably took it. Hogarth thought of it - it makes way more sense. You don’t go back on stuff.” There’s a pause - then, awkwardly, Dimitri wraps an arm around Jim’s back and squeezes his shoulder. Jim sniffs. “I’m sorry I tried to hit you,” he says.

“No big,” Dimitri says, sounding a lot more casual than Jim feels, “you hit like a girl anyways.” 

“I do _not_ ,” Jim says, but he laughs anyway. “C’mon, let’s go inside. Maybe we can try to look for it.”

As he stands up, Dimitri ruffles his hair. It’s probably meant to be aggravating - Dimitri usually doesn’t do anything unless it’s supposed to irritate or annoy - but it just feels…paternal. It reminds Jim of his mother. He shakes his head and wipes his face with a forearm self-consciously before following his brother inside.

 _Cousin._ Following his _cousin_ inside.

Hogarth is staring with some concern at a creased piece of paper in his hands - when he sees the other two enter, he looks at them appealingly. “Uh, bad news,” he says, holding the paper out for Jim to take, “Doppler is definitely _super_ mad at us.” Jim squints - the note is in the brownie’s particular eccentric scribble.

_Foolish boy who thinks he’s smart_  
_Looking for his book?_  
_Maybe I’m tearing it apart_  
_Or hiding it where you won’t look._

He sighs and passes it to Dimitri, feeling like he’s about to throw up. On one hand, at least Doppler _does_ have the book - on the other, he’s never going to give it back, and he’s probably destroying it or worse. The fact that he apparently thinks the situation warrants a riddle only sucks harder.

“What the hell is he talking about?” Dimitri asks, brow furrowing.

“He’s _so_ mad,” Hogarth says, looking uncomfortably from Jim to Dimitri and back. “What are we going to do?”

“I dunno,” Jim replies, shrugging. “I mean, before, we could make that birdhouse for him, but I don’t really - we have to make it up to him, right?”

“Here,” Dimitri says, folding the paper again and tucking it into his pocket, “I’ve got something.” When his hand returns, he’s holding the small black bag of Arrow’s childhood jacks. “Arrow said he liked these when he was a kid,” he says, “so maybe we could give him these. Write him another note.”

“That’s…not actually a terrible idea,” Jim admits, “let’s leave them in the study, so uncle Rick doesn’t find them and throw them away or something.”

They troop up the stairs to the secret door in the linen closet, slipping through one by one into the dust-covered study. Dimitri goes to the writing desk to get a pen and write an apology letter, and Hogarth follows him. Jim, for his part, hangs behind, taking in as much of the study as he can. He’d wanted Amelia to be the sort of person he’d like - in the photograph of her and Arrow in his room, he’d thought she looked stern, but reasonable and protective. When he sees it tonight, he’ll probably see her as she really was - a liar and a cheat. She was probably thinking about leaving her family even then.

Hot tears sting at his eyes - the emotion of the day is pushing pressure into his entire face. He considers slapping himself out of it. It was so stupid - without knowing the first thing about her, he’d wanted to be _like_ her, wanted to learn to draw or something. It’s probably especially stupid to cry about someone who wasn’t even alive anymore, but he doesn’t care. He clears his throat and starts looking at the books on the dusty shelves - and suddenly, something clicks.

“Hey, guys,” he says, “if Doppler hid the guide somewhere we wouldn’t look, do you think he hid it in here? There’s so many books, maybe he didn’t think we’d ever try to find it in here.”

“Maybe,” Hogarth says uncertainly, “guess it wouldn’t hurt to try.”

“Not like we’re gonna find anything else to do,” Dimitri adds cheerfully, “I’ll check this corner.”

Hogarth starts looking through the desk, and Dimitri through some old boxes with books and large scrolls of parchment. Jim, for his own part, starts taking the bookshelf apart, pulling dusty tomes off the shelves and checking under dust covers. There’s lots of weird shit here - he hasn’t ever really looked at most of these books before. _’A Compendium of Unusual Forest Creatures’, ‘The Anatomy of the Household Brownie’,_ and _’The Hierarchy of Elven Societies’_ stick out in particular - not because of their names or content, really, but the name of the author, which is unnaturally familiar. Each one, at the bottom of the title in black lettering, mentions it is _’as Authored by the Noted Cryptozoologist Dr. Delbert D. Doppler, Ph.D.’_ “Woah,” Jim utters, a strange reverence creeping into his voice, “I guess Doppler actually _is_ a doctor, after all. I always figured he was just making that up.”

“Hey, Jim,” Hogarth calls from the desk, “did you draw this? It’s really good.”

He feels his ears heat up, and glances to Dimitri to see if he’s about to get wrecked - but Dimitri, beyond glancing up briefly, doesn’t seem too interested, or maybe is too occupied with the content of the box he’s scraping through to have realized what Hogarth actually said. Jim scrambles to his feet and unceremoniously tugs the sketchbook out of his brother’s hands. “It’s nothing,” he says, a little too quickly, “it was stupid - just forget it.”

“No, I’m serious, it’s really good,” Hogarth insists, “it really looks like dad.”

Jim shakes his head and slams the book shut. His face burns. “He doesn’t deserve it,” he mumbles, “it was stupid. Just forget you saw it - I shouldn’t even have tried.”

Hogarth opens his mouth to speak, grabbing Jim by the sleeve in some moment of reassurance - but he’s interrupted by their cousin from the corner, sounding insistent. “Guys,” he says, “hey, chucklefucks, get over here, I think I’ve got something. Look.”

Happy to find a distraction, the brothers crowd around their cousin, who spreads a large, rolled-up piece of parchment across the floor. It’s a map of their town - it’s drawn to scale, but it kind of reminds Jim of the map in the front of all the _Lord of the Rings_ books. In careful print, different areas are labelled by their names - _The Quarry_ or _Schuyler Forest_ \- and underneath, smaller notes. By the Quarry, _’Dwarves?’_ is posited - on the stream by their house, _’River Troll hunting grounds - stay clear’_. Jim groans. “If only we’d had this _earlier_ ,” he complains.

“Yeah, but look over here,” Dimitri says, and points. In the hills beyond a large field (which Jim realizes is now the scrapyard), there’s a hastily scribbled note. _’September 14th. 3:30. Don’t be late. Bring remains of book.’_

Jim frowns. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He wonders aloud. “The remains of…what, the field guide? But the field guide was still here when _we_ got here.”

“Maybe someone else wrote that,” Hogarth suggests, “maybe Doppler or Arrow or someone.”

He shakes his head. “No, that’s her handwriting. I’m sure of it.” He’d certainly seen enough of it to be sure.

Dimitri rubs his chin. “Well, if great-great-aunt Amelia wrote that, then maybe - what time of year did Arrow say she walked out on them?”

“He didn’t.”

“So maybe she didn’t walk out on them at all,” Dimitri says, “maybe she was just going to this meeting and she never came back.”

“Or maybe she ran for it and never went to the meeting,” Jim replies sourly, “left the book and Arrow to catch all the heat.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Dimitri argues. “The field guide was Amelia’s life’s work. She wouldn’t have left it behind if she was leaving on purpose. Maybe something happened at this meeting that kept her from ever coming back. Maybe she didn’t mean to disappear. Maybe she didn’t _leave._ ”

Jim stares down at the map. He looks between Hogarth and Dimitri’s faces, then back down at the paper. “We have to tell Arrow,” he says.

“No way,” Dimitri says - when Jim fixes him with a death glare, he amends “not yet, anyway. We don’t know for sure that it was an accident. Besides, it might make him more upset, or maybe confuse him or something. We need to be careful.”

“Hey,” Hogarth pipes up, “let’s go there ourselves. Maybe we can find out what happened.”

“Two problems,” Jim says, “one, it’s probably a trap, and two, we’re all still grounded. I’m extra especially grounded. There’s no way uncle Rick is going to let us just waltz off halfway across town after I tried to punch Dimitri in an old folks home. Sorry again, by the way,” he adds.

“Water under the bridge,” Dimitri replies. “Anyway, that reason is hardly going to stop us. We’ll just sneak out tonight. Dad sleeps like a rock anyway. Just come meet in my room at two in the morning and we’ll go out through the window.”

“ _That’s_ how you’ve been sneaking out? God, you’re such a teenager,” Hogarth says, as though he has any room to complain. “Hey, while we’re doing this super illegal thing, can we take Giant? The fields are right past the scrapyard, and I’m running out of metal to sneak to him.”

Dimitri shrugs. “Whatever, why not,” he sighs, “like there’s not enough going on tonight already.”

~~

As if there weren’t enough things that could have gone wrong, all three boys had somehow managed to forget about Dean McCoppin.

Jim takes the most blame for it, honestly - he’s the only one who’d even thought about Dean since their errand week that had taken them out to the dump. In his defense, he’d only really been thinking about Dean in the most abstract way he could be expected to. 

Not that he would have caught them if it hadn’t been for the gryphon, which immediately pounces on a car frame in avid hunger and begins ripping off pieces with its beak. As Hogarth rushes to quiet it, the door of the small shack nearby is kicked open, revealing McCoppin in a bathrobe, holding a crowbar like a baseball bat. “Alright, who’s out there?” He calls, sounding aggravated - until he sees Dimitri and Jim standing in the flooded light from the open door, looking startled and caught-out. “Oh, hey,” he says after a moment, lowering the crowbar, “you’re, uh…you’re O’Connell’s kids, right? Where’s the other - oh, there he is.”

“We’re not stealing anything,” Hogarth insists, running up towards the door, “we’re just passing through.”

Dean rubs his chin, looks at the three boys with a smile. “Sneakin’ out, huh?”

“You’re not gonna tell uncle Rick, are you?”

“Nah - what am I, a narc?” He asks, and laughs - then looks at Jim. “Hey, kid, your shirt’s on inside out.”

Jim looks down - sure enough, the tag of his shirt is right under his chin. “ _And_ backwards,” he agrees, “it’s been a rough night so far.”

“Sure, I get it,” he says, “you three in a hurry, or can I, uh, offer you some…coffee or something?”

“Maybe on our way back,” Dimitri says, “we shouldn’t be too long, if you’re staying up anyway.”

Dean eyes them, as though about to ask them about their behavior - then shrugs and smiles easily. “Well, it’s not my business,” he says, “you boys be safe out there. Come call on me when you get back so I know you’re still alive, alright?”

They promise him they will, and wave as he returns to his house. In the relative quiet left behind, Hogarth insists that they leave the gryphon here while they go on their search for the elves, using its natural invisibility to make a case for it, as well as its hunger and the fact that the sooner it gets something to eat, the sooner it’ll get better (and, ergo, get out of their carriage house). Dimitri and Jim make eye contact, shrug, and agree, if only to get back to their path faster.

Using a flashlight to scrutinize the map, Hogarth leads the way towards the forest through the grassy fields. All the way out here, there’s no one to groom the landscape - the grass is up to Jim’s knees in places, buzzing with crickets and fireflies. Above them, so far away from the city, the sky is blistered with stars, dark and lovely. Everything seems to be so far away in the late evening. The whispering of the wind promises that this moment might last forever - small lights, larger than fireflies and a pure white, floating up among the clearing, catch his eye and try to coax him towards them. Somehow, Jim is unaffected by their charm, if not by their beauty. Will-o-the-wisps, he remembers distantly, creatures that prey on misdirection and deceit.

In front of him, Hogarth begins to zig-zag, looping back around on his pattern. His focus is on the map, but as Jim watches, he struggles to keep his path - and yet walks with such sure confidence that it’s impossible to think he’s in a trance. Dimitri, equally unquestioning, follows him easily. “Wait,” Jim calls, “wait, Hogarth, we’re going the wrong way.”

“No we’re not,” Hogarth says over his shoulder. “I know how to read maps - I know where we’re going. Towards the forest.”

“But the forest is _that_ way,” Jim replies, pointing helplessly, “you’re getting confused! Why aren’t I…” He looks down - sees the tag of his shirt in front of him. Of _course_ \- his clothes are inside out. The number one remedy against fairy magic - he slaps his own forehead. He’d completely forgotten. The shirt thing had just been an accident, the first article of clothing he could grab in the darkness of his room. Now he’s the only one who can resist the little glowing lights. “Hogarth, your shirt,” he says, and hurries towards the front of the pack, “you need to turn your shirt inside out.”

“What? That’s stupid,” Hogarth says, then yelps in surprise as Jim tries to tackle him to the ground. “Knock it off! I don’t want to - hey!”

Dimitri grabs Jim and pulls him off, then pulls Hogarth to his feet. “Do it, Hogarth,” he says. As Jim turns to look at him, he sees that his older brother has already turned _his_ sweater inside out. Now both of them stare expectantly at the youngest member of the party, who throws the map and flashlight to the ground in frustration.

“ _Fine,_ ” he says, and yanks it over his head, turning it out and shoving it back on. “There! Are you happy n- “ he breaks off, looks around the field in confusion. “Wait, where are we?”

“They had both of you in a trance,” Jim explains hurriedly, but Dimitri holds up a palm.

“You don’t need to explain,” Dimitri says, “we believe you. Right, Hogarth?”

Hogarth gathers the map and the flashlight up quickly. “Woah, we were going in _totally_ the wrong direction,” he says, surprised, “come on, we need to go that way, towards the forest.”

They spent the rest of the journey talking, about any matter that came to mind, now seemingly afraid of the silence. The fear of being tricked hides in the dark corners of their mind as they pass between the trees of the dark wood, their thick branches curling insidiously against the blue-black of the sky, blocking out the light of the stars. As they persist deeper into the woods, they come into a clearing.

“This is it,” Hogarth says, looking between the map and the center of the clearing, at a tight ring of red, brown, and white toadstools right at its core.

“That’s a fairy ring,” Jim says, conflicted over whether he should be reverent or terrified, “they amplify the power of the fae. You’re never supposed to step in one.”

Before their eyes, a pointed brown stick pushes up from the ground in the center of the circle. It doesn’t glow, but the darkness doesn’t obfuscate it - every edge and corner of it is immediately identifiable in a way Jim can’t wrap his mind around. It starts to grow - twisting and blossoming in a million different directions, splitting off splinters and growing them into branches, looping elegantly and splitting off again and again, until the stick has grown into a perfect miniature of the trees around them, standing maybe three feet tall and blossoming green leaves. 

“Okay, this is creepy,” Dimitri whispers, shattering the silence, “let’s get out of here.”

They turn - but the path they had taken into the center of the path is gone, and the branches of the trees on either side of it pull together, mending into a flat wall. All around the clearing, the trees grow together, biting like teeth and swallowing them whole.

“Oh, shit,” says Dimitri. Jim grabs Hogarth by the shoulders and pulls him closer.

From the other side of the clearing, the trees separate and pull apart as three beings step through. They’re just a little smaller than Jim, but proportionally, they look like adults - no awkward long legs or stumpy pubescent arms. At the head of the party is a woman with dark skin the color of wet earth, dressed in beautiful fluttering clothes of pink rose petals. Behind her is another woman and a man, both dressed in green swathes of leaves and vines. The woman looks wizened, her skin apple-red and freckled delicately, her hair short and wreathed in a crown of thorny vines. The man is somehow younger than both of them, dark haired and beetle-eyed. Their movements are elegant - hypnotizing. Elves.

“How curious,” the woman at the front of the pack says, dark eyes flicking from one boy to the next. “Three humans. And yet in these nocturnal times, and after so many years with nary a visitor among them. All who have come before you have been led astray.”

“The will-o-the-wisps?”

“Call them what you will. You have thought around them nonetheless - and led yourself here. How extraordinary.”

“We came about our aunt,” Dimitri says, putting himself between the elves and his cousins before Jim can unstick his tongue, “our great-great-aunt, actually. Amelia Smollet. Do you know her?”

The woman in the front narrows her eyes. “Perhaps I was too hasty in my judgement of you, mortals,” she says coolly, “if you seek that woman, you must also know of the book. I warn you now that you would be wise to hand it over to us.” She outstretches a hand, as though expecting one of the boys to pull the book out of some pocket dimension and give it to her at her command.

“We don’t have it,” Dimitri says, “anyway, why do you want it? Why do any of the fae want the field guide? It’s just a dumb book. There’s loads just like it in the library.”

Her hand retracts, and she scowls. “Stupid boy,” she says, “there are _no_ other books like it. It contains a compilation of information otherwise unknown by fae or mankind - it is unique among all human knowledge. Amelia is the most brilliant mind to ever emerge from your…deeply unenlightened society. Her field guide holds…too much information for her kind to ever know. Once we were hunted down, slaughtered in packs like feral dogs. We were forced into hiding. The book cannot be trusted with your species!”

“But - but that was a long time ago,” Jim protests from behind Dimitri. At his side, Hogarth has buried his face in Jim’s shirt, frozen in place and unable to look up. “Humans haven’t believed in fairies in - in years! Anyone who sees that field guide just thinks it’s a children’s book. People are more - more civilized now. They don’t just kill without understanding.”

Her eyes flash. “Don’t they?” She asks sardonically. “Well. If I cannot convince you of the inherent sin of your species, perhaps something else can.” As if on command, the male elf behind her turns back towards the woods and whistles like birdsong, calling something to him.

When it emerges, Jim can identify it immediately. Anyone in the world could. Hogarth looks up and gasps - Dimitri freezes - then, as if in a trance, steps towards it.

It’s smaller than Jim figured it would be, closer to the size of a large dog than any kind of steed, but its hooves are distinctly un-paw-like as it steps, grass and flowers flourishing up and withering away into black leaves in seconds. Dimitri kneels before it, his eyes falling closed. Like a king bestowing knighthood, the unicorn touches the top of his head gently with its long, thin horn. Jim tries to call out to him, but he can only stagger forward, Hogarth hanging on behind him, as he touches his cousin’s shoulder.

_Dark nights. A sky littered with more stars than any man could possibly comprehend, a vast and endless ocean of sky reflecting down. Summer sunsets, whisking orange to purple in an undistinguishable ombre of light. Hoofbeats, wild and free. Winter. The sound of trumpets. Trees fallen in forests faraway, littering the ground with dead leaves. Fire consuming everything. The charred and blackened remains of deer and wolves._

_A rain of arrows, hailing down upon the earth. Red-black blood mottled and staining white pelts. Trumpets and dogs screaming through the woods. A young girl, struck down by an axe, her arms and head twisted grotesquely but her face in serene peace. Grinding bones as a man saws the horn off a unicorn carcass - not carcass. It is still moving. Dog teeth ripping into the flesh of their bellies. White hooved bodies, piled high, swarming with maggots and black flies._

The vision is gone as soon as it came - Jim finds himself breathing hard, clutching at Hogarth’s shoulders, unable to comfort his brother who cries out in alarm and covers his face with his hands. In front of them, he’s stunned to see Dimitri with tears streaming freely down his face. “I’m so sorry,” Dimitri says, and wraps his arms around the unicorn, burying his face in its mane.

“We know what you saw.” It is the eldest woman this time - she steps forward until she is abreast with the other. “You must understand now the danger your refusal puts us in now. We appeal to your sympathy, humans. You are too young to be entirely corrupted, I know it - give us the guide. All will be forgiven and forgotten. We will destroy it. You will be rewarded.”

Jim looks at her, mind swimming in confusion - then his face contorts in anger. “What about the goblins?”

“What _about_ them? They love your world, with its oil and metal and smog. They are vile creatures below all mindful - “

“I _mean_ you seemed pretty willing to use them for your own gain to get the book,” Jim snaps. “I can put two and two together, you know. Sending them to scare us? Make you three look like a reasonable alternative?”

The elves look genuinely confused - they look to one another for answers. “We sent no beasts to retrieve our prize,” the male elf says after a moment, “the only one who commands the goblins is Imhotep.”

“Imho- who?” The name rings a bell, though Jim can’t remember from where. “Elaborate.”

“The beast king, the heart of darkness, the root of the evil in this world,” the male elf explains, “an ogre who has been gathering forces. He intends to wipe out all other fae, or otherwise force us into subservience. We believe he wants to get his own hands on the guide. This is why it must be destroyed.”

Hogarth’s nose wrinkles. He’s been looking forlornly at at the unicorn (now pushing itself into Dimitri’s lap to be pet), but now he looks up at the elves for the first time. “Why would he want it?” He asks. “Don’t all you fae already know everything about each other?”

The elves exchange uncomfortable glances. “There are…some things which even we do not know,” the dark lady says at last, “we make art. We do not cut apart our fae brethren to look inside them. Find out what they are made of. It is barbaric, but it gave Amelia Smollet information which would be…invaluable to our enemies, and could be used to destroy any of us. The import of this cannot be stressed enough.”

Jim feels heat rising in his neck and squeezes Hogarth’s shoulder - a reminder his brothers are still there. Careful. Careful. “So you don’t really care about keeping it out of the hands of humans,” he replies hotly, “you just don’t want this Imhotep guy to have it.”

“It is dangerous either way,” the dark lady says, and extends her hand again. “There. You have heard enough. Hand the guide over now, for surely our words have convinced you of the import of this. We promise you will be handsomely rewarded with whatever you may desire. Gold, fine silks, knowledge - all these things we can give you, so long as you give the book to us.”

From the ground, fingers carding through the unicorn’s mane, Dimitri shakes his head and speaks at last. “We don’t have it,” he says, “we told you before. It’s not with us.”

She scowls. “Then where _is_ it?”

“Um.” Hogarth moves behind Jim. “We think our house brownie has it?”

The dark lady staggers back - beside her, the crowned woman flares in rage. “You _lost_ it?” She shrieks.

Hogarth sinks back further - Jim tries to guard him as best he can. “No, look - our brownie has it,” Jim says, voice growing small, “we think.”

“You _think?_ ” She cries, but the dark lady throws a hand over her chest.

“We have been more than forthright with you, human children,” she says, regaining her calming tone, “and so I will believe that you truly have lost the guide, but that it is safe. You will return to your home, retrieve the book, and return to me. I will make sure of it.” And she snaps her fingers.

Immediately from the ground, vines spring up and wrap around Jim’s legs and waist, holding them tightly together and fastening him to the forest floor. He cries out in alarm, startling the unicorn out of Dimitri’s arms - it bounds away as his brothers spring to their feet and rush to him. “What the fuck?” He rasps, “what are you doing to me?”

“I am making a wise investment,” she says calmly, “with collateral. Your brothers will return with the book, or you will never return home.”

Jim looks helplessly at Dimitri and Hogarth, who have him by either arm and are trying to talk to him all at once - and then he has an idea. He turns to Dimitri. “ _Jim,_ ” he says pointedly, “you have to do what they tell you to, _Jim_.”

Dimitri stares at him, shakes his head in confusion - and then the light clicks on. “But _Dimitri,_ ” he replies, clutching Jim’s arm a little harder than he ought to, “we don’t know where the guide is. How can we get it back here?”

“It’s in my room, Jim,” Jim says, desperately trying to keep a straight face, “you have to get it out of the foot locker. It’s under some of my shirts.”

“Okay. Don’t worry, Dimitri. We’ll get you out of this,” Dimitri says, then glances to the elves. “Well? Do we have a deal?”

The dark lady smiles. “We do,” she says, “your brother Dimitri will stay here in our garden until you return with the guide. If you do not, Dimitri will remain with us for a hundred times a hundred years - long past the day you die and decompose into ash and dirt. And when he leaves our grove at last, all those years will come upon him at once. Do you understand?”

Jim shivers - then nods. “I understand,” he says firmly, “Hogarth, Jim, you guys go on. I’ll see you soon.” His brothers look at him in concern - Dimitri wraps his arms around Jim in a tight hug before taking Hogarth by the hand and tugging him out of the clearing through the path that opens behind them.

The other two elves nod and disappear into the trees, but the dark lady remains. Jim looks up to try and see the sky - but the cover of the trees is so thick it could blot out the sun on the brightest day. He smiles.

“You have to let me go,” he says, after a few minutes.

The dark lady turns to him and frowns, thin and elegant. “I do not,” she says, “your brother has not returned with the guide. Our deal was that you must stay - “

“Our deal was that _Dimitri O’Connell_ had to stay in the forest,” Jim interrupts, “the brother of Jim Hawkins.”

She stares at him. “Yes,” she says after a moment.

“Well, I’m not Dimitri O’Connell,” he says, “I’m Jim Hawkins. And I’m not his brother, either, I’m his cousin. So that deal double doesn’t work.”

Her eyes flit over his face. “Prove it,” she says. Her voice grows sharp and cold - Jim swallows nervously - if he can’t, he’s pretty sure he’s about to be in serious trouble.

“Here, look. On my shirt tag,” he says, pointing to the tag under his chin and showing it to her as she peers down to look more closely, “JPH. James Pleiades Hawkins. That’s me, and you have to let me go.”

She looks at him for a long moment. In her eyes, he sees - as he has never seen before - a look of absolute contemptuous disgust. “You are correct,” she says, “you have fooled me.” And she snaps her fingers, loosing the vines from him. “I do not like being tricked, _James Pleiades Hawkins,_ ” she says, “and you must pray that our paths never cross again.”

The trees part the way he came. Jim runs.

~~

His brothers are waiting for him in the grasses just outside the woods. When he emerges, they run forward and pull him into an embrace.

“I had no idea what you guys were doing,” Hogarth says, smiling as he pulls away, “that was a really good trick. Come on, let’s go get coffee with Dean.”

“Thanks,” Jim says, trying to hide his shaking hands by shoving them into his pockets, “I could really use some coffee right now.”

Dimitri says nothing for a long time as they walk back, but his hand is wrapped around Jim’s elbow at the crook and holding on tighter than is really necessary. When he does speak, it’s slow and ponderous. “That elf lady,” he says, “she said she would keep you for a thousand years and you’d never age, right?”

“Yeah, more or less. Why?”

“Well, if she could keep you that long, couldn’t she have kept Amelia for the same amount of time? Perfectly preserved?” He says - and as soon as he does, it clicks. “Jim, what if Amelia is still in there?”

“You think she’s still alive?”

Dimitri shrugs. “All I’m saying is that she _could_ be,” he says, “and either way, since the elves met her, it means she didn’t…run away.”

Jim thinks on this for the rest of their journey back.

“Hey, you made it,” says Dean, when they knock on his door, “why don’t you three come in, it’s like four in the morning. Long night, huh?” He seems perfectly willing to talk as he pours out two mugs of coffee - then a third as Hogarth insists on his own maturity - with very little verbal stimulus from the older two boys. He talks aimlessly about art and the community around him while the boys drink in silence.

“Anyway. It’s almost an hour’s walk back to the center of town,” he reminds them after a while, “aren’t you three going to need to get going if you’re gonna convince your dad you’ve been in bed this whole time?”

“Actually, do you have a phone?” Dimitri asks. “My cell died while we were out, and I have someone who could give us a ride back.” At Dean’s direction, he heads into the back room to make a phone call.

Outside, there’s a crunch of metal - Hogarth startles, spilling coffee onto the front of his shirt. Dean just stands in one fluid motion, grabbing his crowbar from the side of the door. “It’s just thieves,” he assures them, “give me a minute.”

As he steps through, the brothers look at each other. “Giant,” Hogarth whispers in a strained voice. Jim feels the blood drain out of his face.

“Come on,” he whispers, “let’s stop it from killing him or something.”

Hogarth glares. “Giant won’t kill him,” he says, “he’s too gentle to - “

“Holy _fuck!_ ”

Jim gets outside first, Hogarth second - Dean still has the crowbar, but he’s pressed up against the side of his shack as, in front of him, the gryphon spreads its wings and starts flaring them, hissing aggressively. Jim stares up at Dean in surprise, who is somehow making direct sight-line with a creature that should be invisible to him. Hogarth is more concerned with damage control, running in front of Giant and throwing his arms out, shushing it and stroking its beak in equal parts.

“Hey, hey, hey, it’s okay,” Jim says, “we, uh, we can explain.”

“Uh-huh,” says Dean, shaking bodily.

“It’s okay,” Hogarth says, turning around, “he’s not gonna hurt you. You just startled him.”

“Okay, sure, I startled, uh, I startled _that thing,_ right?” Dean says, pointing. “What - what is - what’s - “

Jim presses his own coffee into Dean’s hands, which are shaking less now that Giant has apparently decided he isn’t worth eating and has turned back around to start nibbling at a twisted I-beam. “It’s a gryphon,” he says honestly, “we found him out by the highway a few weeks ago. They eat metal, not meat, so it’s not gonna…eat you or anything.”

“He’s real gentle,” Hogarth insists, running over to Dean, “he’s just like a wounded bird. His wing is hurt and he can’t fly away yet.” Dean nods, trembling, and tries to drink coffee out of his mug. “He needs a place to stay. And a steady food supply. We can’t feed him at home.” He turns those huge doe eyes up at Dean meaningfully.

Dean looks down at Hogarth, then back at the gryphon. Then he pours his mug out on the ground and wordlessly walks inside.

~~

Jim leaves Hogarth to talk Dean into it - the real problem, of course, is that if they’re driving back to their house, they can’t bring the gryphon in the car with them. He’s more interested in Dean’s apparent Sight. He’s not red-haired, and there’s no family pictures anywhere in his house, so he’s probably not the seventh son of a seventh son. If only he could remember what the other ways to get Sight were - there was hobgoblin spit, and then something about…drinking fairy bathwater or dragon piss or something. The even-grosser alternatives. But without the field guide, he couldn’t know for sure. He rubs his temples fervently.

From the other room, he hears an exhausted Dean say “fine, fine, he can stay here for the night. Alright? C’mon, get out of here,” and Hogarth celebrating. Dimitri returns from the telephone, looking confused.

“Hey, what’s all this?” He asks, pointing towards Hogarth’s excited dancing and the four empty coffee cups on the table.

“I just got a place for Giant to stay until he’s got enough to eat and he can come home,” Hogarth says cheerfully.

“Great. I forgot that was even a problem we were having, but good job solving it,” Dimitri says, “anyway, our ride’s here. And she’s probably pissed at me, since I woke her up in the middle of the night, so be _nice_. And say goodbye to Dean.”

“No need,” Hogarth says cheerfully, “he’s completely unconscious.”

Out at the entrance of the scrapyard as they emerge into the early morning birdsong, there’s a banged up brown station wagon coughing and idling. As they approach, the driver’s window rolls down, revealing a red-haired, attractively annoyed girl about Dimitri’s age. “Get in, losers,” she says, chewing something that’s _probably_ gum, “we’re going shopping.”

“Thank you _so_ much, Anya,” Dimitri says, climbing into shotgun as - in the backseat - his two cousins exchange an intensely meaningful look, “I owe you, big time.”

“Yeah you do,” she says, and slugs his shoulder. Dimitri yelps. Jim decides he likes her immediately. “You better be buying me a cake or something for this. One of those big Costco ones.”

“Oh, that’s right,” he says, “you eat like a horse - ow! Stop _punching_ me!”

“Stop saying things that make me punch you, then,” she replies, and switches into drive. “Everybody in the back got their seatbelt on? Let’s go.”

~~

Rick somehow doesn’t catch them. They sneak back through Dimitri’s window, wave goodbye to Anya (who waves back and rockets off into the night), and look at each other. “Well,” Jim says after a moment, “there’s an adult who believes us now.”

“Think _he’ll_ vouch for us?”

“Oh, for sure,” Hogarth says, “but I don’t think that’ll convince uncle Rick. Dean vouches for _everyone_ , whether he believes them or not. He says you have to stand up for crackpots, or no one else will.”

“So we’re back where we started,” Jim sighs, and takes a step - and trips, landing on the floor unceremoniously. “Oh, come _on,_ ” he grouses into the carpet.

Dimitri kneels down. “What the fuck?” He says, and picks up a silver jack. “Did Doppler just leave these here? For us to _trip_ on?”

“Maybe he was playing with them,” Hogarth says, but Dimitri shakes his head.

“You can’t play Jacks on a carpet,” he says, “you can’t bounce the ball. You know what? I’m _sick_ of this fairy bullshit. If we find that book, I say we keep it.”

Jim looks up at him in surprise. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Dimitri says, and offers Jim a hand up, “I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had about enough of listening to fairies talk about how dumb and worthless we are, just because we’re humans. And I’m tired of following their rules. From now on, we do things _our_ way.”

Hogarth grins. “Yeah,” he agrees, “let’s forge our own paths or - or something. Wait, that could be cooler. Wait, let me think about that - “

They look at Jim expectantly, and he smiles. “Right,” he says, “let’s do it.”

END OF CHAPTER THREE.


	4. The Ironwood Trees

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god, you same two-to-five people who've been reading this fic - we're almost at the finish line! Brace yourselves, my dudes. Shit gets heavy in this one. I mean, I feel like I say that every chapter? I'm always like, "hey, get ready, because an animal will Die Tonight", and then it ends up not being that intense or upsetting at all. So who knows at this point! My word is mud.
> 
> If you like what you read, and you want to read more stuff like it, please leave a comment and let me know that you're having a good time. I love writing this fic, but these chapters are long and they require hours of work, and it's pretty emotionally exhausting! If you're not an ao3 comment kind of person, you can always Get Me on [my tumblr.](http://www.chokopoppo.tumblr.com)
> 
> The last chapter's coming up, and that's gonna be a biggie. I apologize for the wait y'all are about to undergo, and I just hope I can remember to wrap up all the loose ends I've been dangling around. (But don't put that much faith in me. Once I killed off a character in a fic, and like two chapters later, I wrote him back in because I forgot he was dead.)

Down on the mat, Dimitri swings his rapier around in a couple familiar practice stances. He’s wearing a stiff, starched-looking white uniform with a thick pad on the front, supposedly for “protection”. It kind of looks like when the girls at school stuff their shirts with tissue paper, Jim thinks, and snickers.

He’d probably be laughing more, except Dimitri looks really nervous. Jim’s never been to an actual fencing match before, but he knows that everything here is really expensive and super nice, which is making his cousin shaky. Back at his old school, Dimitri said, they just had their meets in the high school gymnasium, and members just picked a gray sweatshirt to be their uniform out of a pile. Out here, there’s a special building just for sports events, with a big auditorium just for fencing. There’s an electric scoreboard, and all these wires that connect to the uniforms and the foils, and the ground is covered in a long black mat that Dimitri calls a _piste_. Whatever it is, it looks like some kind of running course, and it’s so thin it leaves a ton of room for the audience.

Anya’s down there, too, with her bangs shoved back and her ponytail so tight it looks like her eyes are bulging out of her head. There’s a blue pin on her uniform, marking her as the team captain - if she’s nervous, she’s not showing it at all. Her air is totally calm, super professional, and when she goes to talk to Dimitri, he says something that makes her laugh easily, as if completely unbothered by the team at the other end of the mat, staring her down.

The house has seen a lot of Anya recently. Now that the cat’s out of the bag about her existing since she gave them a ride home two weeks ago, Dimitri invites her over to practice fencing every time Rick’s out of the house. As it turns out, she’s _not_ his girlfriend, although it’s obvious that his cousin _wishes_ she was - when Hogarth “subtly” asked, she laughed so hard she fell out of her chair while Dimitri went pink all over and hurriedly explained that it was a joke. If Jim’s being honest, though, he thinks his cousin has a pretty good chance - Anya’s not _ridiculously_ out of his league, and she seems to really like him, even with how much she punches him.

He’s not telling him that, though. Not before the match, anyway. Maybe later.

Anyway, Jim’s got more important things to worry about. It’s a Friday night, and although the match means he’s spending his evening here, he’s _not_ spending it alone. There’s a seat to his left that he’s saving for someone _very_ special.

“Jim! _There_ you are,” his mother calls from the end of the row, and begins to carefully pick her way through the crowd, pushing and apologizing as only she can. “Sorry I’m late - ugh, that line was such a _madhouse_ \- have I missed anything?”

“No, mom, you’re fine,” he says, grinning, “here, I got that.”

She quickly delegates her cornucopia of concessions between the two of them, fretting and laughing with her son, before fluffing her skirt out from under her as she sits. “Hogarth and Annie are sitting over there,” she says, pointing at the chairs facing them on the other side of the room, “with Rick, so he can tell them things about fencing. But I don’t know the first thing about it, so I’m counting on you. Hopefully something specific that I can compliment him on.” She winks. “Have you picked anything up from him?”

“Well…” Jim stares down at Dimitri, who’s standing up and fastening his helmet on, “…I know that the black mat’s called a _piste_.”

She laughs again. Jim smiles, and turns his attention to the floor again. He’s heard his mother laugh more today than in all of last year. The month alone in Rockwell with Ms. Hughes has done her good - she’s got a new cardigan on that he’s never seen before, and she looks groomed and well-rested and happy. Across the way, next to Hogarth, he sees Ms. Hughes wearing one of his mom’s sweaters, and quickly refuses to think about the implications of that. Sometimes, he thinks the advent of the internet might not have done him any favors after all.

On the mat, Dimitri approaches his opponent and immediately strikes - his blade catches the light, sparkles as it snaps forward like a coiled snake. A buzzer sounds as it makes contact, scoring him a point. The next doesn’t come so easy - the boy up against him is no longer taken off-guard, and they quickly fall into a desperate pattern of attack, parry, and riposte, the auditorium filled with the sharp clang of metal on metal. He takes one hit, but flips his defense around into an underhand strike and scores another two points. When the match ends, the fencers salute, and Dimitri pulls his helmet off, red with exertion but smiling easily, eyes slitted with satisfaction.

Jim crows with satisfaction and triumph, and looks across the way to see his brother doing the same. At his side, uncle Rick has a sternly controlled smile, leaning forward, as though afraid to show his pride. Anya’s just as proud as they are - as Dimitri approaches, she throws her arms around his shoulders and says something that makes him laugh uproariously before they sit down together. If Jim didn’t know her better, he’d say she looks pretty pink, too.

When her first match comes, Dimitri cheers loudly from the bleachers. Her opponent, at the other end of the auditorium, grins as he puts his helmet on. Jim elbows his mother. “This guy has _no_ idea what’s coming for him,” he says when she leans in to listen to him, “she’s _so_ hardcore.”

“Uh- _huh_ ,” she says, “is that Dimitri’s girlfriend?”

“He _wishes_.”

The boy going up against Anya raises his foil, as though to score off of her the way Dimitri had scored _his_ first point - she strikes his arm away and hits him in the chest. His attacks quickly fall into panicked defense as she runs him all the way down the piste, striking at him again and again with no quarter, racking up point after point as she steals the point of attack from him again and again. She runs him off the mat twice, letting his cowardice score her another two, defending herself easily from his disjointed stabs and dodging with little space to spare. When the three minutes are up, she’s racked up nine points and is entirely untouched, and after their formal salute, she easily turns without another look to her opponent, who stares at the floor as he returns to his team, flushed and humiliated. Jim _might_ feel bad for him if he didn’t feel such a surge of adrenaline at her victory. Might.

“So? How do you feel?”

“Awesome,” Jim says reflexively, “she _killed_ him out there.”

“Not about the match,” his mom says, and sneaks a handful of his popcorn. He pretends not to notice. “I mean about your birthday. How does it feel to be almost-fifteen, huh?”

“Oh. It’s cool, I guess.” He’d kind of forgotten about that. His birthday’s tomorrow - it’s the reason his mom and Ms. Hughes are even here in the first place. “I guess it’s been so busy around here - I kind of forgot that was…a thing that existed.” 

She eyes him sideways. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” She asks. He wants to think she’s asking honestly, or maybe even just joking around, but he’s heard that tone of voice a lot in the past four years. It means she’s asking him if he’s been getting in trouble, whether she knows it or not. He sighs and shakes his head.

“I don’t know,” he admits, “Dimitri and I get into fights pretty often, but I think it’s just because we’re stuck in the house together a lot now. But we haven’t - I mean, it’s just stupid arguments, not stuff that matters. And we get along a _lot_ better than we used to.”

Without saying anything, she wraps an arm around his back and squeezes his shoulder. It’s a familiar gesture, and one he realizes he’s missed this summer. Even though it kinda makes him feel like a baby, he leans into it for a second. “I know this has been hard on you,” she says, when he finally leans back, “I just want you to know how proud I am that you’re turning this corner. And I - is your shirt on backwards?”

“And inside-out,” Jim assures her, “it’s this, uh, dumb thing Hogarth and I are doing. Whoever can do it for more days in a row wins. He came up with it,” he lies as she raises an eyebrow suspiciously, “it’s totally harmless, mom, honest. It’s not like we _bet_ anything on it. Well, maybe Dimitri and Anya bet something on it, I dunno.” 

Her eyebrow raises suspiciously, but she doesn’t push further, just turns her attention back down to the floor. Jim thinks of things he could say to her - maybe mention the fact that Hogarth has officially filled up all the cages he brought with him back in June, or ask about the house in Rockwell - but finds that he missed his mother’s quiet companionship most of all. He looks down to Dimitri, who’s approaching his next opponent on the mat, and then back towards Anya to see if she’s cheering him on. That’s when he sees someone squatting by Dimitri’s bag.

His brow furrows as he squints, trying to get a better look at her, but no matter how hard he focuses, he can’t seem to make her shape out. Under the pretense of getting a picture of the match, he pulls his phone out and snaps a quick image - but even that seems unnaturally blurry, like something’s keeping her out of focus. She’s got long, straight black hair in a tight ponytail, and she’s wearing fencing gear from Dimitri’s team. She’s _totally_ his type - so why hasn’t he seen her before? He definitely would’ve noticed a girl like _that_. And why’s she going through his cousin’s bag? Maybe she’s trying to steal something, but all she’s going to find in there are practice foils and dirty socks.

He looks across the auditorium towards Hogarth to see if his brother’s noticed the suspicious rifling, but the kid is deep in conversation with his mom, smiling and laughing - and uncle Rick is equally unconcerned, focused intensely on his son’s advance on the piste. Even on the ground, maybe two feet away, Anya seems totally unaware of the girl right behind her, too busy cheering and hollering to be distracted. Or _maybe…_

“Where are you going?” His mother asks as he gets to his feet suddenly, “the match just started.”

“Sorry. Bathroom,” he says automatically, and begins carefully picking his way through the stands and down to the floor. It’s probably nothing, he thinks, but there’s that lingering _maybe_ whispering in the back of his mind. If that girl is some kind of disguised fae - 

“Hey, kid, where do you think you’re going?” The coach stops him as he tries to cross the floor, his arms crossed.

“Some girl was going through my brother’s stuff,” Jim says, and points - but when he looks, the dark-haired girl is gone. “I don’t know who she was. She hasn’t fenced yet.”

“Everyone’s fenced,” the coach says, “I think you’d better go back to your seat.”

Irritated, but fully aware there’s nothing he can do about it, Jim turns to head back into the bleachers - then thinks better of it, and heads towards the auditorium’s doors. Maybe if he goes out to the bathroom and comes back, his mom won’t ask questions. At the door, he glances back, hoping to catch at least a little of Dimitri’s match - and sees _someone else_ at his cousin’s bag. It kind of looks like Hogarth from here. The coach walks over to the other boy, red in the face, and Jim groans. Why is his brother messing around with Dimitri’s bag? What if his mom thinks it’s him and gets mad at him?

He looks up into the stands towards his brother’s seat - and feels a cold jolt come over him. Hogarth is up _there_. And the boy on the ground looks like…

As the other boy turns away from the coach and starts to walk towards the door of the auditorium - towards Jim - he realizes what he’s looking at. It’s a perfect mirror image of himself. And it smiles at him as it walks past.

To his credit, his feet are only frozen to the floor for a few seconds before he wheels around and runs after the Not-Jim, catching it by the lockers. It turns to smile at him.

Jim flinches instinctively. Looking at the Not-Jim isn’t like looking at Dimitri or Hogarth, or even his dad, even though he’s suddenly aware of how much he looks like them. It’s a perfect reflection of him, but it moves on its own, and it has a dark, sly look on its face that Jim’s sure he’s never had in his life. “Who are you?” Jim says, desperately trying to steady his voice, “what are you doing? Why were you looking through Dimitri’s stuff?”

The Not-Jim laughs. “How can you ask me such things?” It says, smiling. “Surely, you must know your own mind, no?”

“You’re not me,” he hisses, and pulls his pocketknife from his jacket. “This is _iron,_ ” he says, struggling to gain the upper hand, “you’re a fairy, aren’t you? You’re a shapeshifter and you’re trying to mess with us. Don’t think I’m going down without a fight.”

Annoyingly, the Not-Jim just laughs again. “And you think you can fight me with that little toothpick?” It says, grinning. “I knew humans offered little resistance, but this is truly pathetic. Go on, now. Put your foolish toy away.”

“I know why you’re here. You want the Guide,” he snaps, “well, you’ll never find it. It’s hidden too well.” 

The Not-Jim smiles, and then suddenly - changes. The differences are almost imperceptible until they’re there, but right in front of his eyes, the Not-Jim warps. Its hair goes blond and curling, its face splatters with freckles, and its clothes are suddenly different, its shirt on right and its jacket melting into bare arms. The boy in front of him has huge, frightened blue eyes, and it throws its arms up protectively.

“What’s going on here? Put that knife down,” rings a woman’s voice, and as Jim glances up to look for its source, the boy in front of him turns and runs down the hallway and out of sight. Before he can look to see where his adversary is going, the principal grabs him by the wrist, and the knife clatters out of his hands.

Down the echoing linoleum chambers, Jim can hear sobs that sound an awful lot like laughter.

~~

Hogarth sits next to him outside the principal’s office. Even in a high school that he doesn’t go to, the principal is having a meeting with his mom. Jim sighs and slumps down in his chair. Just when he thought things were going well, too.

“What happened?” Hogarth asks. He wasn’t there when the principal was chewing him out for bringing the knife to school, and ergo wasn’t there as Jim had desperately argued that he wasn’t _threatening_ the other boy, he’d just been _showing_ him the knife. Anyway, it had all been a lie.

He almost wants to lie to Hogarth, too. Hogarth, who only ever looks up to him, who always takes his side even when no one else would - even when he shouldn’t. Those bright, hopeful eyes almost make Jim wish that nobody believed in him at all. He wishes he could tell his brother what everyone else already knows - that Jim’s a failure, that he’s a slacker, that he can’t stop getting into fights over nothing, that this was just another event in a long train of ugly mistakes he can’t stop making. Instead, he shakes his head. “Shapeshifter,” he says, quietly, “but it doesn’t really matter. Mom won’t believe me.”

“I could back you up,” he offers, “I could say that kid threatened you. Or me! Or I could - “

“Thanks, Hogarth,” Jim interrupts, “but I don’t want you to get in trouble, too. And I don’t want you to lie for me.”

There’s a long silence. “What kind of fairy do you think it was?” Hogarth asks him, “are there kinds of fae that shapeshift like that?”

Jim shakes his head. “I don’t know. I can’t remember. I wish we still had the Guide.”

They fall into silence, which is eventually punctuated by the door to the principal’s office opening. His mom walks out, holding her coat over her arm. She looks exhausted.

“I’m sorry,” Jim starts, but she holds up a hand.

“I can’t talk about this right now,” she says, “Hogarth, can you go find your mother so we can go?”

They walk out into the hallway, and as Hogarth departs (throwing Jim a sympathetic look over his shoulder), she sighs and palms her forehead. “What am I doing wrong?” She asks after a moment. “What do you _expect_ me to do, Jim?”

“Mom, I didn’t do this - “

“How am I supposed to believe you?” She cries, throwing her hand out. “I thought things were getting better, but they aren’t! I was just told that there’s legal grounds for the _police_ to get involved. If you went here, you’d be expelled. This isn’t the first time this has happened, Jim! Do you _want_ to go to juvenile hall?” She pauses, breathes deeply. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Jim’s arms are crossed defensively across his body, and he’s staring down the hallway. He wants to yell back - tell her that he couldn’t explain what happened even if she’d listen, which she won’t - but he can’t handle an argument tonight. “It’s no big deal,” he says after a moment, shrugs noncommittally and turns away, “I wasn’t threatening him, it’s not like…” he trails off at the look on his mother’s face. “Forget it. I’m going to find Dimitri.”

“Jim, don’t walk away from - “ she calls, but he’s already turned a corner and out of sight. If he closes his eyes, he can see her slump and cover her eyes with a hand. He’s certainly seen it enough times before.

She hadn’t even been that angry. She’d just been tired, like she was used to this. Like she expected this from him. His hands curl into tight fists at his sides. 

He meets Hogarth back in the auditorium, where the piste is being rolled up and put away. “Hey,” Hogarth says carefully, “we can’t leave yet. No one can find Dimitri.”

Jim looks at Annie and Rick, who are talking with some concern and staring down at their phones, texting with all the energy that thirty-somethings not accustomed to smartphones can. “Alright,” he says, shrugging, “I guess…let’s see if we can find anyone who would know?”

Hogarth nods and follows his lead as they talk to anyone they recognize from Dimitri’s team. Eventually, one of the girls says that she saw Dimitri arguing with Anya. “It was pretty explosive,” she says, “like, it wasn’t a normal fight for them? She slapped him and stormed off. I think she gave him her medal, too. It was super weird.”

“Her medal?” Jim frowns. “Well, did you see where he went?”

She shrugs. “Maybe he went outside? Anyway, good luck.”

They start walking back towards the front of the school. “Do you think that was really him?” Hogarth asks.

“What? You mean like, if it was the shapeshifter?” Jim considers this. “I mean…maybe? But why would a shapeshifter turn into Dimitri and then get into a fight with Anya?” Something dark coils in his stomach in fear. Since the fight in the hallway, all he’s been able to think about is how much trouble he’s in, and how upset his mom is. But that thing that threatened him is still running around. No one ever found the other kid, which means…

“Jim?” Hogarth says, and Jim blinks. He’s stopped in the middle of the hallway, and his brother is tugging on his jacket. “Hey, maybe we could check out by the car and see if Dimitri went there?”

“Oh. Yeah, sure,” Jim says, and follows his brother back outside and out to the car. He desperately wants Dimitri to be there. Hell, he desperately wants Dimitri to be _somewhere_. Dimitri could be in the office with his mom, ratting him out on every single thing he’s done wrong all summer, and he’d still like it better than this.

“Look,” Hogarth says, pointing at the ground behind the car. Jim glances down - there’s a small circle of stones on the ground, with a first place medal in the center. He kneels down to look more closely, and picks up the largest rock in the circle. When he turns it over, there’s a single word engraved on the back: _T R A D E_

“That’s…ominous.”

Hogarth picks up another one of the rocks. “Do you think these are from the quarry?” He asks. “It’s not that far from the school.”

“Could be,” Jim says uncertainly. “Smollet said that dwarves probably lived in that quarry. But dwarves can’t shapeshift - I mean, I don’t _think_ they can. She didn’t say anything about it. She didn’t know that much about them.”

“Maybe they’re not. Maybe this is just a trap.”

“Yeah,” Jim says, more confidently than he feels, “come on, let’s go. Maybe he’s in the office with my mom or something.” He pockets the stone quickly, just in case.

They trek back to the school and the office in relative silence. Jim doesn’t know how to feel right now, but in general, he’s experiencing every negative emotion he’s ever had all at the same time. Worrying about his own future seems selfish, given that Dimitri may or may not have been kidnapped by shapeshifting dwarves, but he’s not only scared about _that_ , but by the fact that they can’t possibly convince Rick, or Annie, or even his own mom that Dimitri might be in the quarry at all. And he isn’t in the office.

They pause at the door - Rick is on his phone, making yet another call and trying not to look frantic - while his mom is sitting on the couch, talking to Annie. “I don’t know, Annie,” she’s saying quietly, “I have tried _everything._ I’m just barely managing this - he’s so _smart,_ but all he spends his time doing is getting into trouble! I don’t know. Maybe if I could call Leeland, he would let Jim stay with him for a while.”

Jim feels his blood run ice cold. “Come on,” he says, “he’s not here. We have to go.”

~~

If Jim knew how to drive, it probably would’ve taken ten minutes to get to the quarry. On foot, it takes nearly half an hour, and in that time, the sun slips below the horizon and out of sight. Back at the car, Hogarth had insisted they grab the flashlight out of the emergency pack in the trunk, which had given Jim time to take an Algebra 2 notebook out of his backpack and wrap it in his jacket. It weighs heavily on his back, but it’s about the same size as Smollet’s field guide, and if Doppler had managed to trick the boys before, Jim figures the dwarves might fall for the same trick. If there are even dwarves at all.

Hogarth, maybe uncomfortable with Jim’s quiet, is talking about the comic books he’s been reading recently. As the path gets rougher, stuck between wet grass and jagged rocks, his stream of chatter starts to slow and slip away. Jim almost doesn’t notice - he feels sick. _T R A D E_ has to be trading the field guide for Dimitri - everything in this stupid area only cares about that dumb book. But he doesn’t even _have_ it. 

“Jim, look,” Hogarth says after a moment, and shines the flashlight across the dark rock of the quarry, “over there. It looks like a pit or something.”

Sure enough, as they approach, Jim can see there’s a deep gash in the earth where stone has been roughly mined out. When the thin beam of light is moved down towards the bottom, he can see how the color of the rock changes the further down it goes. There’s also a couple ledges, steepled into the side of the rock, but they look naturally formed. 

“Why would anyone want to mine stuff out here? I mean, it’s just _rock_ ,” Hogarth asks aloud. Silence. “Probably granite,” he adds, looking at Jim. More silence. “How are we going to get down there?”

Jim sighs, exasperated, without really knowing why. “I don’t know,” he snaps, “we could jump down, I guess.”

“All the way down? It’s really deep.”

“No, not _all the way_ down. Look, there’s ledges.” He points to them. “We could jump to the nearest one and try to make our way down.”

Hogarth stares at the ledge skeptically, as though trying to form any excuse _not_ to do it. It’s a long way down, sure, but they don’t have time to waste. Jim sighs. “Look, I’ll go first,” he says after a moment, “and you can follow me. If I break my leg or die or something, you don’t have to do it. Okay?”

His brother looks at him, but nods. “Okay,” he agrees after a moment, “I’ll shine the light down so you can see it.”

Jim shifts into a sitting position on the ledge, and - before he can let himself think too hard about what he’s doing - he shoves himself off the side and falls ten feet to the next ledge down. With all the expertise of a childhood jumping off high walls and out of tall trees, he sticks the landing. His knees groan and pop, but he pushes himself back up after a moment. “It’s safe,” he calls up, “come on, jump down.”

There’s a gentle scuffling sound above him, and Hogarth falls gracelessly onto the rock ledge beside him - and the flashlight bounces out of his hand and down into the darkness of the pit. Jim cries out in alarm, throwing a hand out as if to catch it - but in vain. It clatters all the way to the bottom, and douses the boys in absolute darkness. He feels something hot and angry and scared growing in his stomach - his arms start to shake.

“I can’t _believe_ you,” he yells, “why didn’t you throw me the flashlight before you jumped? What are we supposed to do now?”

It takes a moment for his words to process in his own brain - but it doesn’t take Hogarth long at all. Eyes wide in shock, his brother jerks his shoulders up around his ears, flinching back like he’s afraid of being struck. Jim clasps both hands over his own mouth.

“I’m sorry - that wasn’t - “ he says, but his brother has turned away and is staring intensely at the ground, hands in fists at his sides. Jim recognizes that posture. It’s what he does when his mom is yelling at him, and he’s trying not to cry. 

Shit. He fucked this up so bad. 

“Hogarth - “ he starts, then halts - runs a hand nervously through his hair. “Look, I think that’s another ledge. I’ll jump down, and then I can probably get to the bottom.” No response. He shakes his head - he should’ve expected that. “Okay. I’ll…call up when I get to the bottom.”

He can't even see the ledge in the darkness. He jumps on the jumbled thoughts that he _might_ have seen it, when the light was still there, and the outline of what he can see now.

He hits the stone hard, skimming his palms badly and scraping the denim over his knees open. Without giving himself time to recover - or, for that matter, to chicken out - he rolls over the edge and falls the next twenty feet to the quarry floor, hitting it on his side and silently cursing as his shoulder screams in pain. The flashlight isn’t more than five feet away from him, and he crawls to it, clutching his arm.

“Jim?” Hogarth calls nervously into the pit.

“It’s okay,” he says back, “don’t move, I’ve got the flashlight. I’ll find a better way down for you.” He shines it up onto the rock, and finds - surprise, surprise - an easier path, sloping down with occasional overhangs to climb down. With some coaching, Hogarth manages his way down, slowly but surely. Wrapped around the flashlight, Jim’s hand begins to bleed.

As Hogarth gets to the bottom of the pit, Jim swings the flashlight beam over the rest of the rock. He has no idea how they’re going to get back out, or - really - where they’re supposed to go from here, but as his light shines over the wall opposite them, a collection of fungus seems to pick it up, and glows a soft blue. “Huh,” he says to himself, “that’s, uh…what’s the word for that?”

“Bioluminescent,” Hogarth supplies, but he doesn’t elaborate. Jim nods and looks back at the wall. Illuminated by the glowing fungi, he can just barely make out something carved in the side of the rock. It looks like lettering, but when he shines his flashlight over it for closer inspection, it disappears in the mechanical light. When he drops the beam again, the glow intensifies in brightness.

_’SEEM TO TRICK HEN TOOK PEN’_

“What does that mean?” He asks aloud, and looks at his brother, who shrugs and sits on a nearby rock.

“I don’t know,” Hogarth says, “you’re the riddle guy. You figure it out.”

Jim sighs. This is on him, but he can’t help but feel frustrated and annoyed. He’s not feeling it about Hogarth, necessarily, but - well, he needs to fix this. He goes to sit by his brother. “Look, I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he says, and looks at his feet, “I…my mom’s thinking about sending me to stay with dad. I’m scared, and I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I just got angry. I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at…me.”

Hogarth doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then leans sideways to rest his head on Jim’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” he says, “I forgive you. Just don’t do it again.”

“I wish I could promise not to. It feels like I don’t have any control over it.” He sighs and runs his hands through his hair. “I’m just like dad.”

“No, you’re not,” Hogarth replies, whip-quick, “dad never apologizes, and he never spends any time with me or does anything I want to do. He always says what I’m doing is boring or stupid. You always do stuff with me, even when I know you don’t want to do it. And you feel bad when you yell at Dimitri.”

“I feel bad right now for yelling at _you_ ,” Jim points out, and Hogarth laughs. He rubs his younger brother’s back. “We have to get him back,” he says, “do you think we’re supposed to get a chicken or something? Or a pen, or…I don’t know. If this is a riddle, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Hogarth stares intently at the writing on the wall for a minute. “Wait,” he says, “give me a piece of paper or something to write on.” 

Indulgently, Jim pulls a notebook out of his backpack, and (after some searching) manages to retrieve a pen as well. Hogarth clicks it in and out incessantly for a minute, then scribbles down _’SEEM TO TRICK HEN TOOK PEN’_ \- then begins to underline certain letters, and underneath, writes _’MITES THREE TOCK KON’_.

Jim looks over his shoulder. “You got something?”

“I think it’s like those word puzzles in the newspaper,” he explains, “my mom does them all the time. Actually, she does all the puzzles, especially when something bad happened in the newspaper that day - it helps her blow off steam.” He clicks his pen in and out rapidly again, and then gets a big, stupid grin on his face. “Got it,” he says, and scribbles down _’KNOCK THREE TIMES TO OPEN’_.

The brothers turn and grin at each other. “Woah,” Jim says, “good sleuthing, Watson.”

“Um, no offense, Jim, but I’m pretty sure _you’re_ Watson,” Hogarth says. He stands up fluidly, brushes dirt off his pants, and knocks on the stone wall three times. “See? This is some Sherlock type - “

He doesn’t get the chance to finish his sentence. Underneath them, the ground rudely interrupts him by disappearing from below their feet and dropping them, yelping, down a deep pit into absolute darkness. Rather than hard impact, though, they land in something soft with a lot of give - as Jim tries to push himself up, his hand falls through a hole in what feels like a cold rope mesh.

First things first - he reaches out to grab his brother’s hand. “It’s okay,” he says, when Hogarth cries out in terror, “it’s just me. Look, we’re here together. It’s okay.” He speaks in a low, calming voice, trying anything that might keep his brother from panicking. This isn’t Hogarth’s first time in confinement at the mercy of fae - it’s not Jim’s, either, now that he thinks about it. But they need to stay calm.

All around them, so slowly Jim doesn’t perceive it until almost a full minute has passed, the darkness begins to dissipate in a soft golden glow of earthen light. His eyes adjust as the light does, and he can see it glint off the net they’re lying in, which he can see now is made of silver threads spun fine and woven together into ropes. Everything about it bends and moves like a soft material, and yet, the closer he looks, the more certain he is that it’s real metal. More interesting, though, is the cavern below and around them - somehow, deep underground, there are evergreen trees the size of redwoods, encircling the cavern. In front of him, for the first time since the sunset, he can see his brother’s reddened, tearstained face, and his own bloodied arms.

“Well, well. Lower it down, then,” says a male voice from below them, and around them, the net jerks and begins to sink. Hogarth grabs at Jim’s arm and buries his face in his chest. “What have we here? I’ll be. It looks like prisoners! We haven’t had any prisoners in a long, long time. Not since - er, when was the last time we had prisoners, Georji?”

“The last time must have been…what, before the Great Flood?” Says another voice. As they’re lowered towards the bottom of the cavern, Jim can make out their shapes - standing in front of them, three men, standing maybe three or four feet high, but wizened and ancient regardless. Their clothes are simple brown linens and burlaps, but piled high on their arms are bracelets and rings, so elegantly made they hardly look real. Their hair is beaten out in shades of pale grey or white, flooding over their shoulders and dripping down their chins in braided beards and tied pigtails, looped in place with bands of gold.

“Dwarves,” Jim whispers to his brother, who risks peeking out of his shirt for a glimpse.

“They seemed so much friendlier in The Hobbit,” Hogarth whispers back, “aren’t fae supposed to be weak to iron and stuff?”

“Emphasis on supposed to. Dwarves are different. Iron doesn’t hurt them - they’re metal smiths, for the most part,” he replies, and then, in a louder voice, addresses the dwarves themselves. “Hey, we’re looking for our brother,” he says, “we brought the field guide. We want to trade.”

The dwarves look at one another. Jim thinks he can see them smiling under their beards, but he isn’t really sure. He’s never met anyone with so much facial hair before - he wonders how they can tell if one of them is upset or not under all of it. “Ah, the Guide,” the first dwarf says, and steps forward, “of course, we are but humble workers, unable to make such a trade. You must speak to the Korting if you wish to have such an honorable meeting.”

“Surely, these mortals cannot be _so_ valuable as to warrant a meeting with the Korting,” Georji says, sounding affronted, “it is disrespectful to his high office.” As Jim squints, he realizes that under that thick beard, there’s a woman - er, a female dwarf. A low level of sexual dimorphism, indeed. She catches him staring and scowls at him. At least, he thinks she’s scowling. Again, it’s hard to tell.

“Nonsense. This is not the old Korting - he has a strange fascination with these mortal creatures, and would be anxious for the opportunity to see one in the flesh,” the first dwarf says, “go on, then. Send Bartok to retrieve the wheeled cage, and we can take them there ourselves.”

“I _can_ hear you myself, you know,” grumbles the third dwarf, and disappears between two of the trees.

“Hey, real quick,” Jim interrupts, and the two dwarves startle - then glare at him, clearly unhappy to be interrupted, “why do you keep calling us mortals? I mean, I know we have shorter lifespans than you guys do, but it’s kind of rude. You guys are living creatures, so you’ll die someday, too. Everything’s mortal. It’s not that weird.”

“That is where you are wrong, my child,” the first dwarf says, and chuckles to himself. “You see, everything _born_ on this planet will one day return to the earth from which it came. That, at least, is true. But our people wish to end the cycle of death. _We_ will create a new, brighter, _immortal_ world. You shake your head, child, but if you doubt my words, you have only to look around you to see the evidence of our splendor. Behold!” He throws his arms out dramatically, gesturing to the trees - and Jim focuses on just one of them for the first time. The trunk, he realizes, isn’t made of wood, but stretched, tawny bronze, the right color and texture of bark and intricately woven to look warped and knotted, identical to any tree from the woods back home. The leaves, so delicately connected to its branches on razor-thin stems, are silver or iron, perfectly folded and criss-crossed with impossibly thin veins. As his head looks one way, then the other, he realizes each tree, huge and intricate, is individually made, with its own flaws and lines. They’re right in the middle of a mechanical grove.

“Jim, look,” Hogarth whispers, and points. In the branches of one of the trees, there’s a mechanical bird, hopping along and pecking at the wood, as though it were searching for worms. Its eyes are set gemstones, its wings folds of sheet metal. “That’s _so_ cool,” he whispers, his fear forgotten. Jim smiles in agreement.

The dwarf laughs. “Of course, we have made ourselves companions, to accompany our iron world,” he says, “you shall see many of them - not just birds, but a plethora of different, beautiful beasts. Beasts which can never be injured, which can never grow hungry or thirsty or tired except for our enjoyment. Which can never die,” he adds, and smiles as Jim turns back to frown at him, “so again I ask you to behold these: our ironwood trees! Beauty which shall never fade.”

“Stop trying to sell it, Ursus,” Georji snaps, “mortals cannot conceive of our brilliance and the beauty of our work. Anyway, Bartok has returned. Let us make haste, so that I might return to my work and waste no more time with such nonsense.”

Sure enough, the third dwarf has reappeared, wheeling a giant, golden cage with a flat, red top and a large trolly handle. It kind of reminds Jim of one of those wheeled popcorn stands that pop up at every carnival, fairground, and sporting event like mushrooms on a corpse. Except that he’s never been inside one of those, and he’s being unceremoniously dumped into this cage and wheeled off like a kid in a shopping cart.

As Hogarth loosens his grip and finally starts to peer out through the bars, Georji grabs the cage by its handle and begins to push them between two of the ironwood trees and down a long hall, lined with beautiful trinkets of gold, silver, and jewels. Mechanical lizards climb across the walls while golden cats lie contentedly on shelves, their chests rising and falling with an accordion-wheeze as winding keys spin from their backs. Jim looks with some envy at an emerald necklace, nicer than anything his family has ever owned - at his side, he hears his brother gasping in excitement as an iron dog saunters past them, a lepidolite-pink tongue wagging out of its mouth.

Finally, they emerge into a cavernous room, deep in the belly of the earth - Jim can’t help but gasp. Gold glints off every edge of the room, from high chandeliers dripping with tiny diamonds to a marbled floor, piled high with ancient coins and gemstones, riddled with shining silver detritus. It reminds him of illustrations from a book he read in his childhood, of dragon lairs over hill and under dale - up to the throne in the center of the room, thick with hanging necklaces and cluttered with goblets and plates of beaten copper. It’s too large for a dwarf. The man sitting in it looks like…a human.

“My Korting,” Ursus says, bowing deeply as the two other dwarves follow suit, “we bring you two mortals from the upper world.”

The Korting waves a hand dismissively. He is very young, and clean-shaven, and something about him looks familiar, though Jim can’t imagine why. “Oh, please, enough with that,” he says, his voice surprisingly nasal, “the Korting was my father. Please, I insist you call me Beni.” He peers into the cage at the brothers in front of him. “So,” he says, “you two are here for the trade, I can tell. You want to give me the Guide in exchange for O’Connell’s son.”

“What? How do you - “ Jim shakes his head, confused. “I mean, yes, we are, we have the Guide. But how do you know our uncle’s name?”

Beni leans back in his throne, satisfaction plain on every feature of his face. “I met your uncle many years ago,” he says, “that was before I became the Korting, in this world of glittering jewels and gold. It is an inherited job,” he admits, “once passed from father to son, but apparently it didn’t give these people the kind of turnover they required in a government. I was all too happy to volunteer my services when the situation was explained to me. And O’Connell’s son, I hope, will be equally compliant.” He motions at one of the dwarves, who bows and leaves the room.

Jim frowns, trying to work out what’s going on, but Hogarth gets there first. “Oh, _gross,_ ” he says, sticking out a tongue, “you want _Dimitri_ to be your weird prince or something? I mean, sure, you gotta pick _somebody_ , but why wouldn’t you pick someone with more…” he makes a bike-pedaling motion with his hands. “…Y’know, charisma or good looks or something? Or someone smart?”

“Wow, brutal, Hogarth,” Jim breathes.

“Well, it’s _truuue,_ ” he replies, “we love him because he’s our family, but let’s be real here, that guy has nothing to recommend him. He even lost one of his fencing matches today.”

Beni frowns. “I admit that O’Connell’s son was not our first choice,” he says slowly, “at first, we intended to take the fencing champion. I sent out my squadron to find the victor - the girl with the medal.” He shakes his head. “But our plans were complicated - most of the dwarves can’t tell the difference between male and female humans, and the boy somehow ended up with the medal, though he did not win it. At first, I wanted to return him, until I found out he was the son of my old rival, O’Connell. The result is unorthodox, but it will please Imhotep all the same.” He smiles unevenly.

“Why are you even teaming up with that guy, anyway?” Jim asks, crossing his arms over his chest. “He wants to take over the world. Destroy all of humanity. How can you sit idly by?”

“Very comfortably,” Beni says smugly. “You see, the world will be destroyed one way or the other, and since I’ve racked up too many debts on humanity’s side and I owe a lot of people a lot of money, it’s a lot easier to just let all that wash away in a tide of blood. Imhotep is strong, and will find a way to power with or without my help - I prefer to stay on the good side of genocidal monsters. Besides,” he says, throwing his arms out to gesture to his glittering throne room, “the dwarves are my people now, and I translate for their wishes. They want to fill the earth with their sculptures and cover it with their ironwood forests, replacing all plants with their silver masterpieces. I would be a fool to deny such riches.”

“No, you’re pretty stupid to take them, anyway,” Hogarth says. Jim covers his mouth with a hand as he snorts with laughter. “If you cut down all the trees, what’s going to produce oxygen for the planet? If there’s no plants, there won’t be anything to fill the atmosphere with oxygen, and then what? You won’t be able to breathe. You’ll choke to death and die. You’ll be so dead you won’t know what to _do_. Because you’ll be _dead_.”

Apparently, this thought has never crossed the mighty Korting before, and his face crumples in confusion and concern. He looks like he’s trying to figure out if this is true or not. Before he can come up with something, though, a door from the other side of the hall opens, and on another small cart, a dwarf wheels in a glass casket and props it up in front of the boys.

Inside, eyes closed and hands folded over his chest, lies Dimitri. At least, context has told Jim that it’s Dimitri, which is important, because the man inside looks nothing like his cousin. His hair is combed properly and wreathed in a golden circlet, shaped like just-blossoming flowers on a spring day. His fencing uniform from that evening is gone, replaced with a rich green tunic, fitted flatteringly to him at the chest and blooming out over his hands, which clasp the most intricate handguard of the most beautiful sword Jim’s ever seen. 

Jim swallows. The body in the coffin looks dead. “Is he okay?” He asks, wishing he could hide his fear better.

“My workers assure me he is perfectly alive,” Beni says. “Apparently, he will stay so in that condition for an eternity, or at least, until I am dying and he is to take my place. It’s some chemical that he’s breathing or something, I don’t know how it works.”

“Wait,” Jim says, “I told you, we’re here to trade. Here.” He reaches into his backpack and pulls out the false book, wrapped in cloth. He can hear blood pumping in his ears. “I have the Guide right here,” he lies, “give us our cousin back and you can keep it. Give it to your master or whoever. Just let us have Dimitri back.”

Beni’s eyes glitter with malice and greed - he strides forward and snatches the book out of Jim’s hands. “Done, of course,” he says, “take all three of them to the prison.”

“What?” Jim slams his fists on the bars. “You said you’d trade!”

“And I did. Don’t you read books? You’re supposed to parlay for your freedom, and if you forget, oops! You stay forever.” He gives an exaggerated shrug, grinning smugly. “As it happens, I don’t really want you running off to O’Connell and leading him down here. The last time we spoke, it ended on less than ideal terms. I’d rather you just stay imprisoned here and eventually wither and die, like me.” He waves a hand, and the cart below them begins to wheel away. “Take care, kiddos!”

~~

Jim doesn’t pay attention to the winding path they take - he buries his face in his arms, rests them on his knees. Humiliation, anger, disgust and self-loathing battle one another for dominance. All that frustration, all that talk with his brother about how Hogarth had behaved foolishly, and it was _Jim_ who had fallen into the predictable, age-old trap. He takes no notice of the case with his cousin being propped up on the wall opposite them, or of any of the beautiful mechanical animals they stop in the vicinity of. Georji, who had pushed Dimitri’s case along, salutes Ursus and takes her leave.

“Well, this is a fine pickle you boys have gotten yourself into,” Ursus says pityingly, “I’m afraid I can’t help you, much as I’d like to. But maybe I can get you something. Would you like a ball to play with? Oh, or perhaps one of our toy mice? They do tricks,” he adds, in that tone of voice that adults use with children and children use with imbeciles.

“I’m hungry,” Hogarth says, “we’re living creatures, you know, we’re not mechanical. If you want to keep us alive, you have to feed us.”

“Oh, sure,” Ursus says, rubbing his chin through his beard, “why don’t I get you a mash of spiders and turnips? We fed those to our last prisoners and they just _adored_ it. Used to holler with joy when they got it.” 

“Oh, boy, don’t get me hungry thinking about it,” Jim snarls, “I might just break through these bars with all the _excitement_.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t be breaking through _this_ cage,” Ursus says cheerfully, “I built it myself, you know. Sturdiest thing I ever made.”

“It’s pretty cool,” Hogarth says. Jim glares at him, but either he doesn’t care or he’s pretending not to notice. “But how are you going to give us food? There’s no door anywhere.”

“Good eye, boy, good eye. But there _is_ a door on this side!” The dwarf taps on one of the bars. “See, we didn’t want anyone lockpicking their way out, so the lock is actually hidden _inside_ this bar. Isn’t that neat? It’s far too small to be jammed.” He looks really pleased with himself. “When I built this, I had to use a hammer the size of a pin to get all the gears shaped correctly. The old Korting himself said it was a masterclass of mechanic pioneering. He said that!”

“That sounds super cool,” Hogarth says, “can you unlock it so we can see?” Jim jerks his head up in surprise and stares at his brother, who still won’t look at him. Hogarth has been planning this the _entire time_ , he realizes, coming up with a plan to get the door open.

Ursus chuckles and reaches for his ring of keys. “I haven’t had the chance to show this off since before the Great Flood! Well, if you really want to see it - no, no, I’m certain you do, for it’s thoroughly fascinating! - you two had better get back a bit. Yes, all the way back to the other end of the cage, there’s a good lad. Now, watch _this_ \- “

With a key the size of a bobby-pin in his hand, the dwarf makes some movement behind the bars and turns it. Within the bar, there’s a soft clunking and clicking of gears at work, and suddenly the central section of the cage wall swings open on unseen hinges with a soft hiss. Jim darts forward - but the door is slammed shut before he can push himself through.

“Ah, to be young and reckless,” the dwarf sighs happily, “you know, I just _knew_ that wouldn’t have been so exhilarating if you hadn’t at least _tried_ to escape. My blood is pumping like a steam compressor engine! Now, I’ll see if I can - hey!”

In his distracted and rambling state, Ursus has quite forgotten to back away from the cage, and Hogarth’s hand darts forward through the bars and snatches his ring of keys off his belt. He scrambles back, keys clutched to his chest, as the dwarf shoves a stubby arm inside to try and grab them.

“Give those back!” He cries. “You’re prisoners! You aren’t allowed to have those.”

“Back off,” Jim says, clambering in between his brother and knocking Ursus’ hand away, “don’t touch my brother. We’re _not_ giving them back.”

Ursus looks between the two of them, almost frightened - then he turns and runs for one of the doors. Distantly, they can hear him calling for guards.

“You okay?” Jim asks his brother, who’s shaking so hard the keys jingle in his hand. “Here, I got this, don’t worry about it. That was crazy, man, you totally got him,” he adds, as Hogarth drops the ring in his hand, “you’re awesome. That was incredible.”

“Yeah, yeah, praise me later,” Hogarth says and waves a hand dismissively (though he looks very pink and rather proud), “come on, get us out of here before guards come. They can’t all be _that_ easy to trick.”

Jim quickly selects the correct key and, after some struggling, finds the lock on the bar. The door flies open again, and the boys quickly bound out. Hogarth goes to watch the door - Jim hurries to their cousin’s casket. There’s a latch on the side, which he flicks open, and the whole top half releases with a hiss of escaping gas. “Dimitri? Dimitri, get up,” Jim whispers, prodding his cousin in the cheek. There’s no response at all - Dimitri’s head simply lolls to the side.

“They’re coming,” Hogarth calls, “Jim, we have to go. What do we do? We can’t outrun them, we don’t know the way!”

Jim whips his head around, looking for inspiration. “We’re not leaving without Dimitri,” he says, “but _they_ don’t know that. We have to hide in here. They’ll think we’ve run away.”

“Where?”

He points to the flat red lid of the cage. “There.”

With some assistance, Hogarth clambers up onto Jim’s shoulders and then up onto the top of the cage - Jim quickly follows suit, shuffling up the bars and scrambling to get situated. As he pulls his legs out of sight and curls into a ball, three dwarves burst in through the door.

“They’re gone,” he hears Georji say from somewhere below them, “I can’t _believe_ this, I left you alone for _two minutes,_ Ursus - “

“Yes, I know, I know, you’re _always_ right,” Ursus grumbles, “look, there’s only two doors, and we just came through that one - they must be down the other way.”

“Right. Come on. Churrut, go back to the throne room to retrieve Bartok and tell him to wind the hounds. We will have need of them.”

Two pairs of footsteps run down the far tunnel - one returns the way it came. After a moment of quiet, Jim lets out a breath and climbs down the side of the cage. “We gotta hurry,” he says, “let’s grab Dimitri and go already.”

Grabbing Dimitri turns out to be a far easier job than Jim was worried it would be. Maybe without all the gas that had been in the case, Dimitri is already starting to stir. When Jim shakes him by the shoulder, he groans and tries to roll over like he would in bed at home. “Dimiiiiitri,” Hogarth whispers right by his ear, “Dimitri, get up. Anya’s coming over.”

Sluggishly, their cousin slaps Jim’s hand away from his shoulder and grunts unattractively. “Whatwhatwhat,” he mumbles, cracking an eye open, “what’re you…what’s going on?”

“We’ll explain later,” Jim says, “come on, get up, we gotta go now. Here, lean on me.”

Sword in one hand and Jim’s shoulder in the other, Dimitri limps along at a just-palatable pace, though his air is confused and dizzied - probably still recovering from being drugged, Jim figures. He doesn’t hold it against him. “This way,” he says after a moment, pointing down the far tunnel, “at least we know dogs aren’t coming from down that way.”

“Dogs? I hate dogs,” Dimitri says distantly, as though he’s speaking from the other end of a kaleidoscope, “I’m allergic to them.”

They gimp along in tandem, Hogarth now leading the way down the dark path and through the wet black tunnels deeper and deeper into the rock. The golden chambers seem spottier out here, rarer and less beautiful when they appear. From faraway, Jim can hear the sound of rushing water.

And suddenly, from behind them, distant metallic barking.

Jim and Hogarth make eye contact. “Oh, _shit,_ ” Hogarth says, and they run - Jim half-dragging Dimitri by the arm down the path and through thick forests of stalagmites and stalactites. 

“When we get home,” Jim calls, panting, “we’re going to have to have a real talk about your language, kid. Mostly because- because I don’t want to survive this only to get killed by your mom!”

“I learn from watching _you_ ,” Hogarth calls back, “look, there’s a - a canyon or a…a dippy-thing over there, whatever you call it. If we jump it, the dogs won’t be able to follow!”

Sure enough, as they round a corner, Jim sees a deep rift in the stone floor. The rushing water he’d been hearing flows rapidly far below the crevasse. It’s not too far a jump - maybe five feet, which he makes easy in gym class - but Dimitri gives another confused groan from beside him, and suddenly Jim is all nerves. 

In front of them, Hogarth, propelled by his own fear and adrenaline, launches off the nearest side of the rift and hits the other side, quickly getting a grip and pulling himself up. Jim turns to his cousin as they run. “We have to jump it,” he says, watches Dimitri shake his head in fear, “I need you to help me - we have to do this _together_.” Behind them, the barking is growing louder, more frenzied.

“Jim - “ Dimitri says, and takes his hand. Together, they leap.

Jim makes it fully onto the rock on the other side - Dimitri lands rather gracelessly, the small stones on the floor cutting nastily into his green tunic. Hogarth helps him up as Jim brushes dirt and debris off his pants, and turns to look back the way they came. A swarm of silvery-metal dogs explode into the room, running as far as the edge of the pit and yelping noisily. From behind them, the sound of cursing in a foreign tongue - someone calls “hurry! Go get the bridge!”

“Come on,” Jim says, his legs shaking badly, “let’s get out of here.”

They wander on - twice, Dimitri pleaded with them to slow down or stop to let him catch his breath, but the sound of furious barking was still so close with no end in sight, and Jim insists they push on. As the caverns grow darker, Jim retrieves the flashlight from his bag and flicks it on, illuminating shallow pools full of blind white fish.

“Where are we?”

“I dunno,” Hogarth admits, “but there’s got to be a way out of here. The quarry’s surrounded by a bunch of water infrastructure stuff, like pipes and things. I looked up some blueprints of the city when I was _bored,_ okay,” he says as Jim and Dimitri fix him with a look of absolute bafflement, “they were upstairs in the attic. It’s _not_ that weird.”

“It’s a little weird.”

“Whatever. The point is, these caverns could be super deep, but they can’t be that _wide_ , or they’d run into pipes and flood the whole place. So at some point, it’s got to circle back around to where we were when we got in.”

Jim’s brow furrows. “The great flood,” he murmurs, “Hogarth, what if they already _did_ bust a pipe?”

They look down at the pools of water in the ground, the wet walls, the stalactites hanging from the ceiling. Somewhere, there’s a gentle tapping noise, like drops of water landing on wet rock. On instinct, Jim shines the flashlight towards the sound and slowly approaches.

Down one of the dark tunnels, there’s a strange creature - smaller than a dwarf, but larger than a goblin. Long ears swivel back and forth like satellite dishes, while emaciated, three-knuckled fingers tap a deranged morse code into the stone walls. As the three boys approach, it turns foggy white eyes towards them.

“ _Shhhh,_ ” it whispers to them, “ _besilent. Thestonesarespeaking._ ”

Jim stares at it in confusion. “Uh, okay,” he agrees after a moment, “but before that, do you know how to get out of here?”

“ _Followthepipes. Thepipeswillshowyoutheway._ ” It extends a long finger and points towards a small hole in the end of the wall, barely large enough to crawl through. “ _Lookintheceiling. Seewherethelightstonegoes._ ”

“Um. Thanks,” Jim says, “come on, let’s go.”

“ _Wait,_ ” it whispers after them, “ _HogarthHughes. Giveusyourhand. Foryou._ ” In those long fingers, it holds out a rock and drops them in Hogarth’s unresisting hands. “ _Thestoneswanttotravelwithyou. Takehimwithyou._ ”

“How did you know my name?”

The creature taps rapidly on the rock wall. “ _Thestonesspeaktome. Thestonesknowall._ ”

“Nevermind.” Jim takes Hogarth by the shoulder and Dimitri by the hand and guides them towards the hole in the wall. It’s small, and cramped, but they can quite literally see the light at the end of the tunnel - with some relief, Jim recognizes a bronze glint of light as the tawny metal of the ironwood trees. Hogarth goes first - concerned about losing Dimitri behind him, Jim insists that his cousin go next.

One by one, they emerge into the light, the dawning orange of sunrise distant above them, the ironwood forest shimmering around them.

And again they hear the metallic clang of paws on rock, of barking from nearby. “Shit,” Jim hisses, “they’re trying to cut us off! Climb!”

Hogarth immediately scrambles up the trunk of a nearby ironwood tree - Dimitri freezes in a daze at Jim’s side, and only begins to move when Jim grabs his hand and begins to drag him up into its branches. He climbs slowly, falling behind as the hounds burst into the room like water from a dam, pouring through and swarming at the tree. One catches the edge of Dimitri’s tunic in its teeth and tears it away - the other dogs swarm to it and rip it to pieces.

“Leave him alone, you jerks!” Hogarth calls from above them, and raises the stone from the creature in the cave. “Get away from him! Leave him _alone!_ ” He hurls the stone, probably intending to hit one of the dogs, but instead chucking it halfway across the room.

The dogs stop - they whip their heads back towards the rock - and then one turns tail and bounds towards it, scooping it up proudly in its jaws as the other dogs flurry around it in excitement.

Hogarth stares as the dog runs back towards the base of the tree and gently lets the rock fall out of its mouth onto the ground, staring up at him hopefully with sapphire inset eyes. “Fetch,” he says quietly, “they want to play fetch. Jim,” he calls, “you get Dimitri as far up as you can.”

To Jim’s horror, his brother begins to shimmy _back down_ the tree towards the ground. “Hogarth,” he hisses, “Hogarth! This isn’t a good idea!”

But he’s beyond listening. Hogarth steps back onto the ground and scoops the rock back up in his hand - the dogs follow the arc of his arm with rapt attention. “Come on, boys,” he says in an uncharacteristically simpering tone, “you wanna play fetch? G’wan! Go fetch!” With some kissing noises thrown in just for kicks, he chucks the rock across the room, and the giant herd bounds after it, scrapping with one another until one gets its jaws around it and runs back, panting.

He throws it again and again as, above him, Jim urges Dimitri up through the branches of the tree and out through the cave entrance. “Hogarth!” He calls back down, “Dimitri’s through! You’ve got to get up here. Come on, you can play fetch later.”

Hogarth almost looks disappointed - Jim knows his brother would much prefer getting all the dogs and taking them all home, and probably “rehabilitating” them into “good boys”, to leaving them all here safely - but he nods, takes the rock one more time. “Come on, boys,” he says encouragingly, “last one! Come on!” And he hurls the rock as hard as he can, sending it flying through the door. As the pups skitter around after it, he pulls himself up onto a branch and into the morning light.

~~

Jim helps his brother up with an arm while Dimitri, apparently, has a horrible revelation.

“Oh, _gross,_ ” Dimitri says, staring with disgust down at his clothes, “what the hell am I wearing? What _happened?_ Why did I wake up in a coffin? Where’d this sword come from? I mean it’s nice, but…wait. What is this, like a…like a pageboy uniform from the medieval ages or something? Why’s it _green?_ ”

“Well, there’s the Dimitri we know,” Jim says, smiling, “welcome back, buddy. By the way, would it kill you to lose some weight? I was carrying you the whole way here. Not a great situation, all told.”

Dimitri looks like he’s going to sass back, then catches sight of something behind them and grabs both brothers around the shoulders. “Come on, come on,” he says, “get down.”

As they scramble out of sight into the varied pale rocks of the quarry, a swarm of goblins floods out of the cave and along from the road, headed by a huge, monstrous figure - maybe twelve feet tall, its head bursting with antlers, its body wrapped in fine pale linens from another place and another time. Behind it, hands tied and head hidden under a cloth sack, is an adult, their features obscured in the early mist.

“Who is that?” Hogarth whispers.

“I don’t know,” Jim whispers back, “I can’t see. Why would they need a human prisoner?”

From the dwarven caves, a slow procession emerges, headed by the Korting. “Oh great and mighty Imhotep,” he wheedles, “I have brought you the Field Guide of Amelia Smollet, retrieved from the children of her progeny at a very steep price.”

The figure stares down at him. “No, you have not,” it says, its voice gravelly and rotten, “for my soldiers have gone to the house of Amelia Smollet and retrieved the Field Guide entirely on their own. _You_ have been _tricked_.” And in one hand, it holds up the book, its cover clearly visible in the sunlight.

Beni looks visibly astonished, his head whipping from the guide in Imhotep’s hands to the fabric-covered tome in his own - then bows his head reverently. “Of course, my lord and master,” he says, “you are truly more gifted both in your mind and in your body than I or any of my craftsmen could ever hope to be.”

“Yes, I am. And so I wonder why I keep you under my protection in the first place.”

Beni glances up. “Sire? You keep me at your side because - “

“Silence,” Imhotep says, and casts a hand out over the earth. “You have failed me in the singular task I gave you. No matter. You will not have to live with your regret. Kill them.”

At his word, the goblins leap forward and swarm the small procession, their claws tearing into flesh as the air fills with screams and hideous bubbling laughter. From behind his rock, Jim watches, shaking, as the dwarves are torn apart, crying out in agony until they are silenced. Worse still, he recognizes the forms of Ursus and Georji, flailing and reaching for one another as the horde consumes them.

He’s never seen anything die before. He feels like he’s going to throw up.

“Come, comrades,” Imhotep cries, “we return to my palace! Let us spend no more time in this archaic wasteland.” With another great wave of his hand, the goblins fall into line, and the swarm disappears as quickly as it had come, out of the quarry and into the cornfields.

Jim slumps backwards, pale and shaking. Next to him, his brother is crying soundlessly, shocked tears streaming down his face. Their cousin wraps an arm around their shoulders, one brother under each arm. “Hey,” he says, “it’s okay. We’re okay.”

“No, we’re not,” Jim cries helplessly, “we don’t have the guide, and those _things_ are looking for us, and we can’t tell anyone because no one will believe us! We’re all going to die and it’s _all my fault._ ”

“Hey,” Dimitri says sharply, “this is not anyone’s fault. We are going to go home and we’re going to tell my dad what happened until he believes us. And to make him believe it, we’re going to get _Dean_. And the gryphon, and anything else it takes to prove it to him.”

Hogarth sniffs. “We are?”

“Yes,” Dimitri says with a confident finality, “we are.”

And as the sun blinds them in the distance, he helps his brothers to their feet and begins to guide them home.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR.


	5. The Wrath of Imhotep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, y'all, here we are.
> 
> Before you get out your double-spoons and dig into this deliciously angsty final chapter of Smollet like a grown adult who just found out that unlimited access to the ice-cream bar is five dollars an hour, I just want to say how important this project is to me, and how happy I am that it actually...came to fruition. This fic is going to clock in at around 60k words, which makes it the longest project I've ever finished and possibly the longest project I've ever written, period. When I started writing this fic, I thought I was going to get maybe two chapters in, because that's what I always do - start projects, get bored, give up as soon as it gets hard. But maybe that's why I was able to finish Smollet - writing this was never hard for me.
> 
> It certainly hasn't gotten the kind of attention some of my other fanfiction has - there's no scenes where robots go to bone-town, or women have complicated romantic feelings towards each other, and I still agree with chapter-one-me that conceptually, this is one of the dumber things I've come up with. But I don't mind - I'm happy with what I've made, and I'm happy to have made it for you. Of all the things I've written in the past decade, this is what I'm most proud of, because I loved it, and I loved writing it, and I loved finishing it. 
> 
> I hope Smollet has moved you in some small way, and that if it hasn't, that you've at least laughed at a few jokes or even just laughed at the _concept._ I know it's never going to be one of those big, fandom-famous pieces, but I don't care about that. I just care that it made me - and two or three people who read it without me sending it to them and needling them about it - happy.
> 
> As always, you can find me at my [tumblr](http://www.chokopoppo.tumblr.com) and yell into my askbox if Ao3 gives you the heebie-jeebies. Let me know what you think - it'll encourage me to do more, dumber projects in the future, and never fully let this pride go.
> 
> \-- Choko.

The light of the sun runs wetly through the early-morning air like a broken yolk as the three boys trudge toward the small shack in the scrapyard. Dimitri heads the pack, gimping along as he shakes the drugged haze in his head, shivering in his wet tunic. Hogarth kicks rocks along the path, his hand cold in Jim’s. 

Jim feels like he’s about to fall asleep on his feet - but every time he closes his eyes, he sees violence and blood. A swarm of ancient dwarves cut down where they stood by an army of goblins - with that beast at the head of them. Imhotep.

“Where’s Giant?” Hogarth turns his head back and forth in confusion as they approach the house. “He should be here. He’s not better yet.”

“I’m going to get Dean,” Jim says, and leaves his brothers to look for the dumb bird. It’s daytime, but Dean’s got to still be here - his truck is still parked outside. But when he knocks loudly on the door, there’s no answer, and when he walks in to call Dean’s name, there’s no response. “Dean?” 

He’s nowhere inside. He’s not in the bedroom, or the kitchen, or even - Jim checks with some trepidation - the bathroom. The keys to his car are hung up on a small hook over his stove, but Dean isn’t anywhere to be found. And he left the doors to his house _unlocked_. Whatever happened, Jim isn’t sure - but he takes the car keys and leaves the house, feeling like a thief. “He’s not here,” he tells his brothers.

“But his truck,” Dimitri says, eyebrows furrowing in confusion, “are you sure?”

“He’s _not here_ ,” Jim snaps, “we need to go. Come on, get in - we can apologize later.”

“Wait, you want to steal Dean’s car?”

“It’s an _emergency_ ,” he insists, not feeling very confident in his decision himself, “we need it.”

Dimitri gives him another suspicious look, but catches the keys when Jim tosses them to him and doesn’t voice another complaint. Which is good, because Jim doesn’t really know how to drive.

Dean’s house was unoccupied and undamaged - Rick’s house is neither. As they drive up the gravel path towards it, Jim sees with a sinking feeling in his gut that the front door is hanging open, and the windows on the first floor are smashed in, leaving chunks of broken glass hanging around the frames. And up on the roof, the huge figure of Hogarth’s missing gryphon, baying like a donkey and cornering some small animal there with it.

“Giant!” Hogarth cries, scrambling out of the car to wave his arms over his head at the creature on the roof, “come down from there! Your wing isn’t better yet - come on, come back down!”

“What’s he got up there?” Dimitri says, holding a hand over his eyes to block out the sunlight so he can squint up at the sky. “It’s too big to be one of Hogarth’s other pets.”

Jim tries to make the figure out - his stomach plummets. “It looks like a goblin,” he says, and for a moment, that memory of screams roars in his ears, blocking out all other noise. His breath shakes.

“Oh my god,” Dimitri whispers, “dad - _dad_ ,” and bolts into the house, sword drawn. Jim rushes in after him, his sneakers crunching against glass, plaster, and wooden debris.

The inside of the house makes that first week of destruction look like amateur hour - whole chunks of plaster have been taken out of the walls and dashed against the floor, revealing the wooden skeleton of the house underneath. The bodies of several dead animals are strewn in gristly pieces up and down the stairs, while the door to the basement is ripped off its hinges and sitting on the floor of the kitchen. The table is broken in half - all the chairs are missing their legs, as though torn apart purely out of spite. And, in the center of the TV room, surrounded by broken glass, couch stuffing, and torn-out book pages, sits Dr. Delbert Doppler.

“Doppler?” Jim says unbelievingly. He hasn’t seen the brownie since their first encounter with the goblins. “What happened?”

He looks as ashamed as Jim feels. “All my fault,” he says softly, “this is all my fault. If I hadn’t tried to hide the guide, maybe they never would have found this place.” Up close, Jim can see a long, red scratch along the brownie’s face and dark, tear-swollen eyes unable to look up at him. “I was a fool - to think my magic could have protected this place. The goblins, I could have fought off. The ogre - I’m such a pathetic _weakling._ ”

“Doc, where’s Rick? What about my mom, and Ms. Hughes?”

Doppler sniffs. “Last night, your uncle returned home with a friend of his - he left with your mothers with, I believe, the intention of being at places the three of you might return to overnight, while he remained at the house. He was alone when Imhotep’s army arrived. They bound him and carried him away.”

“No,” Dimitri sputters from behind him, and sinks to his knees, face white, “they can’t have. They _can’t_ have.”

“Oh my god,” Jim whispers, “we saw him. We _saw_ him - the adult in the quarry - he was there and we didn’t even _recognize_ him.”

“Where are they taking him?” Dimitri asks, “where were they going?”

Doppler shakes his head. “I don’t know. Somewhere as disgusting as them, I expect, but beyond that - I couldn’t say. I’m sorry.”

They sit in silence. Jim’s brain is screaming at him - the world feels like a million knives crushing into his flesh, and it’s all he can do to keep breathing. He’s shriveling up inside his own body, and only distantly feels Hogarth’s hand on his shoulder, as though his brother were miles away instead of inches.

“We don’t know where he is,” Hogarth’s voice echoes hollowly in his skull, “but there’s somebody who does on the roof. Come on, Jim. I don’t think Giant’s killed that last goblin yet.”

Jim blinks, shuddering back into his own body with a jolt. Of _course_ \- there’s one left. Goblins have a language, and some even speak English - they can interrogate it. But that means getting to the roof before the gryphon gets to the goblin, which means they’re going to have to hurry. Next to him, Dimitri clearly has the same thought, and they scramble to their feet in tandem, fall into step behind their youngest brother as they sprint up the back staircase, two steps at a time.

The steps to the attic are along the hall of the second floor, and they run past the busted remains of their rooms, catching sight of ripped up mattresses and torn books, emptied suitcases and strewn cages. But Jim pauses as they pass the linen closet - the door to Amelia’s study has been discovered and forced open, hanging sideways on weak hinges. His heart slows. “Wait,” his mouth says without any input from his brain, “wait, I have to - I just - “

Without thinking, he pushes through and stares around in silent horror at the study. It’s no more desecrated than any other room in the house - the chair is broken and the books have been thrown from their shelves, loose torn-out pages scattered so unanimously they make a thin carpet on the hardwood floor - but something about the destruction of _this_ room, a room that had been hidden and perfectly preserved for so many decades, makes him feel as though nothing will ever be right again. Hot tears sting his cheeks.

“Destroyed,” he says as Dimitri follows him in, “everything’s destroyed.”

His brother wraps an arm around his shoulders. “Come on,” Dimitri says, not unkindly, “we have to go.”

Jim lets himself be pulled away and pushed back through the doorway, and wipes at his eyes with his bare arm. “I’m okay,” he insists, “sorry, I’m fine. Let’s go.”

~~

They scramble through the window of the attic onto the roof one by one - Hogarth insists on going first, as the gryphon is more likely to listen to him than to anyone else, and Dimitri insists on going second, as he’s the only one who can actually defend them if things go sour. So by the time Jim scrambles up onto the black slate tiles, wincing as their sunbathed color burns at his arms, Hogarth has more or less calmed the gryphon down. He hasn’t gotten it to move _back_ at all, but it seems calmer in his presence then it did a moment before.

“Alright then, good on ye’, lad. Now just get it’s mouth pointin’ in a southernward direction away from yours truly, aye?”

Jim looks down at the familiar face from across the roof, and something warm bubbles up in his gut. “Silver,” he says with a smile - then quickly shakes it off his face. “What are you doing here?”

“Jimbo!” Silver looks up at him, then back down at the roof, and then at the gryphon. “Er…well, until the gryphon showed his head, I didn’ _exactly_ know this was yer humble abode. Nice place, you know.”

Hogarth is mostly keeping the gryphon in line by putting his own body between it and Silver and shouting random phrases, and it’s taking most of Jim’s mental energy to block the sound out. But that still leaves just enough for him to put two and two together, and as he adds up the pieces, his face contorts in rage. “You did this to our _house_? To our _uncle_?”

“Hey, ’twas a momentary aberration, Jimbo,” Silver insists, looking only slightly apologetic, “I was just followin’ orders, you know. An’ the rest of the charge _did_ abandon me up here so’s they could steal my share of the - ”

“Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you when you _looted_ my _house_?” Jim cries. Next to him, the gryphon makes an aggravated noise and tries to wriggle out of Hogarth’s iron grip on its beak. “You kidnapped our uncle. You trashed our home. You killed Hogarth’s _cat_.”

“I didn’ kill anything, Jimbo,” Silver says, sounding affronted, and holds his hands out to reveal a small, purring ball of fur.

“Byron!” Hogarth crows triumphantly, and Jim darts forward to take the cat into his own hands before Silver can change his mind and chow down on it. But in their distraction, the gryphon catches sight of the movement, and its head darts forward, grabs Silver’s arm in its beak.

“Ach, would’ye - leggo!” 

“ _Shit,_ ” Hogarth hisses, and then, in a loud, commanding voice, yells, “Giant, no! Drop him! _Drop._ ”

“Is that thing trained?” Dimitri sputters hopelessly, “does it know any actual, like…english commands?”

“Um.” Hogarth grins toothily. “This is lesson one?”

“Aw, fuck. We’re fucked,” Dimitri says, “guys, new plan. Hogarth, you grab the goblin’s legs - “

“ _Hob_ goblin,” Silver insists loudly.

“Are you fucking crazy? Are you arguing semantics with me _right now_?” Dimitri yelps. The gryphon swings its head to face him for a moment, nearly knocking over Hogarth in the process, and he stumbles a little closer to the edge of the roof. “Sorry, sorry,” he mumbles quickly. “Like I said - Hogarth, you grab the _hobgoblin_ by the legs, and Jim and I are going to grab the gryphon by the beak and _force_ it to let go.”

“I just want to say it out loud - I hate this plan,” Jim says, inching forward.

“Your protest has been noted,” Dimitri replies, “now go!”

Like one, the three boys converge on the gryphon, which is none too happy to release its hard-caught prey. It wriggles its head back and forth, gripping its beak down tighter as Jim and Dimitri grab it and pull it apart, bit by bit. Hogarth, unsure when the beak will actually _open_ , holds tight onto Silver’s legs and leans his entire weight into pulling him back as Silver yelps in pain and protest.

After an eternity of fighting against the wriggling, giant beast, the gryphon gives in - its beak gives out under the effort of three adolescents, and with a squawk, Silver is loosed. Hogarth stumbles backwards, his hands slipping against his grip, and falls on the roof as the hobgoblin goes flying over the side.

“Silver!” Jim scrambles along the tiles to try and catch him before he falls to his death, only to see him catch himself on one of the windows and hoist himself inside. “Dammit, he’s getting away,” he growls, then hurries back to his brother. “You okay, man?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Alright. Come on, we’ve got to hurry if we’re going to catch him,” Jim says, and helps Hogarth to his feet. Together, the three boys climb with some trepidation back down into the attic, and thunder down the stairs.

Their speed is unnecessary, however - when they reach the bottom floor, Silver has already been apprehended by Doppler, tied to a chair with the remains of one of Hogarth’s torn-up sweaters. He curses at the brownie as they approach.

“Ah, Master Hughes, my apologies for the usage of your garment,” Doppler says, actively ignoring the stream of profanities washing over him, “it was already damaged, and I knew I had to act quickly to apprehend this dangerous criminal.” He snaps his fingers, and the garment tugs tighter around the hobgoblin. Jim thinks of shoelaces tying themselves when no hint of Doppler was in sight and feels vindicated in his early astonishment.

“Nice work, doc,” Jim says, glowering at Silver (who has the sense, at least, to look chagrined). “No more running, Silver,” he snaps, “where’s Imhotep’s lair? Where’s uncle Rick?” A pause. Silver looks like he’s weighing his options. Jim’s expression darkens further. “Tell me, before I put you back up on the roof with the gryphon where we found you.”

“Alright, lad, _alright,_ ” Silver grumbles, “no need tae threaten, you know. I’ll tell you quite willingly.”

There’s a pause. “ _Now,_ ” Jim adds after a moment.

“Alright, alright. Imhotep’s built up a lair on the edge of the junkyard outside of town. He’s probably taken your uncle there, like everything else. There’s no way you’ll be able to get in - it’s guarded by an army of goblins.” He scratches himself unattractively. “Plus a dragon.”

“A _dragon?_ ”

“Yup. A mother dragon, with babies an’ everything. I haven’t seen them, on account ‘o bein’ stuck up on yer roof, but apparently he’s on his way to pick them up right now. There’s basically no way you’re going to be able to get in there. If I were you, I wouldn’t even try. I suggest you give up on the rescue plan, cut your losses, and hide out in the old dwarf caves. Lots of gold and jewelry to wipe your tears away.”

“Not interested,” Jim says, although that isn’t _quite_ true - his mind darts back to thoughts of gold-flushed caverns, and his traitorous thoughts wonder if looting it would actually be _immoral_. His mom could quit her job forever - they could move back to Montressor - 

“You’re going to take us there,” Dimitri says, his sword pointed directly at Silver’s chest, and Jim startles out of his reverie, “or we’re going to feed you to the gryphon. They trust you, right? Since you’re basically just like them. You’re taking us to this trash heap place.”

“They don’t trust me _that_ much,” Silver protests coolly, “I can’t exactly swagger in with three human boys as my escorts, you know. It’ll be suspicious. You’ll need a better plan than that.”

Dimitri looks down at his younger brothers. “Alright, guys, come here,” he says, and ushers them away from the hobgoblin, “huddle up. As much as I hate to admit it, he’s right - we’re going to need a plan. We’re going up against goblins, a dragon, and an ogre. Jim, you read the guide a million times - did it say anything about weaknesses?”

Jim sighs and shakes his head - the pages, once so perfectly preserved in his mind, are now sifting away like ashes in the wind. “I don’t remember anymore,” he admits, “but Amelia Smollet would. She wrote the book. She would remember.”

“Well, we can’t exactly talk to her,” Hogarth says, and then, seeing the look on his brother’s face, adds, “oh, no, _Jim…_ ”

“Why not? We know where she is,” Jim says, thoughts running together like streams bursting into a river, “I could just go ask. And I could take Doppler as proof that Imhotep has the book. That’s what the elves were afraid of. Now that he has it, there’s no reason for them _not_ to help us - they’re in danger too - “

“Jim, the last time you spoke to the elves, they tried to keep you over hill and under dale _forever_ ,” Dimitri says, looking more concerned than Jim usually gives him credit for, “I can’t let you just walk in there by yourself.”

“We don’t have another choice,” Jim says. “You guys interrogate Silver - figure out everything you can about Imhotep. Any personal weaknesses, like greed or laziness or something. Vanity? That’s a big one for fairies. I’m going to talk to the elves.”

Dimitri and Hogarth give him two versions of the same look - an unspoken _’this is the worst idea you’ve ever had, ever, including that time you attacked your cousin in a mental hospital’_ \- but for once, they don’t argue with him. “Okay,” Dimitri says slowly, and pulls him into a hug, “be safe.”

~~

It turns out, driving’s not that hard, especially when there’s virtually no one on the road. Jim’s thankful for that, because he definitely does some stuff that he’s _pretty sure_ is illegal, and he hasn’t quite figured out braking yet.

Doppler sits in his shirt pocket as he walks through the fields towards the elven grove, uncharacteristically quiet. “I should never have hidden the book,” he says as they approach the trees.

“I should’ve listened to you when you told me to give it over,” Jim admits, “I’m sorry.”

Whatever talk they could have shared, it falls silent as Jim walks into the grove. For a moment, he screws his eyes shut, waiting for vines to reach up and grab him from the ground or for an elven arrow to pierce his flesh or something - do the elves even shoot arrows? The ones in The Hobbit do, but that’s not exactly empirical evidence - but there’s nothing. Just a circle of toadstools in the center of the clearing, without a small sapling within them, and the quiet chitter of birdsong.

Jim waits patiently for a moment, pacing back and forth - calls out into the trees. “I’m kind of in a hurry, here,” he adds, shoving his hands into his pockets.

The silence stretches.

He should never have taken that book, Jim thinks sourly, or at least he should have given it to the elves as soon as he’d gotten his hands on it. Or maybe not - after all, if the elves were going to be this snotty and condescending, and not even come to see him when he needed help, maybe they didn’t deserve it, after all. He glares bitterly down at the toadstools. They’re selfish, only coming to speak to him and his brothers when they wanted something from him. He pulls a foot back, intending to kick the little mushrooms apart.

“Foolish child,” a soft voice says, and Jim looks up to see the dark lady appear through the trees, “what are you doing, returning to this place?” Her eyelids are lowered, her voice slow and sorrowful. The other two, her friends or bodyguards or whoever, are nowhere to be seen - the pink dress she had worn to their first meeting is gone, replaced with bronze armor and a cape of red leaves. Her kind must be preparing for war, he thinks. Or perhaps they’ve already started fighting.

“Please, I need to talk to Amelia Smollet,” Jim says, “it’s urgent.”

“Why should I help you?” Her eyes are half-lidded, as though she can barely stand to look at him. “The book is gone. You have nothing left that I could want for. Imhotep’s reign is upon us. Do you know how many of our own we have lost in the blink of an eye? How many of the dwarves, who lived for so many centuries and were our close and particular friends, have merely been slaughtered in the course of a moment?”

“I know,” Jim says, “I saw. But - please. I just need to talk to Amelia. She’s our only chance of fighting back.” He pauses. The elf looks unmoved by his plea. “And…if we can defeat him, I’ll bring you the book after we get it back. You can destroy it forever.”

“Why should I believe you? You have lied before, _James Pleiades Hawkins,_ ” she says pointedly. Her lips curl in disgust as the words pass them. Jim swallows.

“Look, I know what it looks like. And I know that I…that I let you down,” he says lamely, “but I can prove that I wasn’t lying about the book. I told you that my house brownie had it - I brought him. He can tell you himself.” He reaches into his pocket, lets Doppler climb on (it’s just more dignified), and sets the brownie on the ground in front of him.

If Doppler is mortally terrified (which, if he had to guess, Jim would guess he probably is), he doesn’t show it. He bows deeply, eyes cast reverently away from the dark lady’s face. “Doctor Delbert Doppler, house brownie of the Smollet estate, at your service,” he says steadily, “humans often lie, but the boy is telling the truth. I was responsible for the absence of the Guide in his meeting with you - not him. I am at fault.”

The elf stares down at Doppler, then slowly moves her eyes to Jim’s face. Her face might as well be a mask - she shows no signs of her thoughts at all. Jim shifts restlessly.

“Our time to command and punish is past,” she says at long last, “the time we had feared is, as you said, finally upon us. If Imhotep keeps the Guide, he will be too strong for us to fight back. We will surely all perish.” She looks back down at Doppler. “But you must promise that if you are able to retrieve the Field Guide, you will bring it to us, and we will destroy it.”

“Of course,” Jim says immediately, trying to hurry the conversation along, “I’ll bring it here right away.”

“No need. When we want it, we will call, James Pleiades Hawkins,” she says, and steps back towards the trees. The way she says it almost sounds like a threat. “Look above you,” she says, and points - as if on command, a single leaf falls from one of the trees and begins to spiral slowly downward, as if fluttering through water instead of air. “You will have until that leaf touches the ground to speak with your aunt,” she says, and disappears into the grove.

And as she does, someone else walks out.

Jim recognizes Amelia Smollet immediately. Her skin is a little older than it was in the photograph in his room, and her eyes are darker than in the portraits in her study, but from her thin shoulders to that perfectly cut bob of red hair, to even the pinched way she holds her face, she looks so familiar she might as well be a family member. She _is_ a family member, after all.

“Captain Smollet,” Jim says quickly, “it’s…it’s so good to - “

“Yes, I know who _I_ am,” she interrupts, “who are you? When I was told I had a visitor, I must admit I was quite distressed. I was told it was a young boy, and I thought perhaps it was my son - but you are not. Who _are_ you?”

“Oh - I - “ Jim blinks. Her voice has that cadence of old British radio shows, brisk and nasal and clicking. It’s weird to hear in real life. “My name is James Hawkins,” he says after a moment, “I’m your…nephew. Well, I’m actually - your great-great-nephew.”

Her brow furrows in confusion. “I’m sorry, you must be mistaken,” she says, “my son can’t possibly have another sibling, or I would know about it, and anyway _they_ couldn’t possibly have children. My son Arrow is only nine years old.”

“No, ma’am, he’s not,” Jim says, his palms starting to sweat, “you’ve been down here for years.” He glances towards the leaf. There’s not much time left - there wasn’t much to begin with. “Look, I need your _help,_ ” he manages, “there’s an ogre - Imhotep - and he’s kidnapped my uncle, and you’re the only one who would know anything about them.”

Amelia eyes him with suspicion. “How old are you, Master Hawkins?”

“I’m four-“ he stops. That’s right - it’s his birthday today. He’d forgotten. “I’m fifteen, ma’am.”

“Hm.” She sniffs. “Well, if you’re dealing with anything as dangerous as an ogre, I’d suggest you stay out of the way and not get hurt. They’re vicious creatures, and far too dangerous for a child to deal with. Your enthusiasm and vigor are excellent qualities, but you haven’t had the training. If my son was trying to deal with such things - if he _does_ when he turns fifteen - “

“He turned fifteen a _long time ago,_ ” Jim snaps. He can feel himself boiling over - everything’s gone wrong, no one ever _listens_ to him. The time is slipping away. “You’ve been down here for _years_ , Amelia! _Decades!_ Your son is older than _you_ now, and he grew up alone because of all this fairy _bullshit._ If you don’t help me, people are going to die. There’s no one who’s older, and there’s no one who can help me but you.”

Amelia opens her mouth, then shuts it. She looks shaken.

Jim breathes deeply and sighs. His hands are shaking at his sides. “Please,” he says, “you have to know what to do.”

Her eyes flit back and forth, as if taking the world in for the first time. “I don’t,” she says quietly, “I’m sorry. I don’t even know if I can believe you. I know the elves are powerful, but I can’t have been here for more than a few weeks. A month or two, perhaps. Time passes…differently here.”

There’s a small cough from the ground, and Jim looks down with surprise to see the brownie still standing at his feet. “Captain,” he says, and as she hears his voice, Amelia’s whole countenance brightens, “I can vouch for the boy. A great deal of time has passed indeed since your disappearance, and we must hurry our meeting now.”

“Doctor Doppler,” she says, sounding surprisingly charmed. Jim squints. “I suppose I can’t disregard _your_ high opinion, despite disregarding everything else.” A smile graces her face, thin and subtle, and Jim realizes distantly that she’s very beautiful. 

When her eyes flicker back to him, the smile disappears as quickly as it came, leaving only a stately facade. “Very well,” she says, and sniffs, “we haven’t much time, as I understand it. I have no plan, and no advice that I can give you, but I do have facts. I know the name Imhotep. He’s a very powerful ogre, and like the rest of his kind, very vain. Likes the sound of his own voice, likes to surround himself with anything he can be compared favorably to. Flattery is your best option if you need to keep him focused - he’s very prone to bragging.”

“The goblins say he’s got a dragon, too,” Jim adds helpfully.

“A _dragon?_ ” Amelia’s mouth pinches and her eyebrows raise - despite her propriety and generally academic air, Jim gets the feeling that this is somehow… _exciting_ for her. “I’ve never seen a dragon in this part of America. They mostly keep themselves to China and northern Europe. _Fascinating._ I’ve never seen one myself, but I’ve read up on them - I suppose it’ll most likely be a Gaelic Wyvren, or an Egyptian Wyrm. Very fast, very poisonous. The most common sign of a dragon nearby is a poisoned water supply, like a well or a river.”

Jim’s eyebrows furrow. He feels like he has puzzle pieces that go together, but he can’t seem to fit them into place. “All the water in our house burns when you try to drink it,” he says, “but we don’t use well water. The pipes bring water everywhere in town.”

Amelia shrugs. “Either way, the water’s gone sour. A _dragon_. You shall have to take notes on it for me, of course. I’ve heard they often feed on cows’ milk - is there some source of livestock nearby? There’s the dairy farm - but I suppose that was years ago, now. The entire town, did you say?” Behind her eyes, her brain is whirring a million miles an hour - Jim watches in fascination. He thinks, maybe, he’s never met anyone truly brilliant before now - never seen true, staggering intellect before. “If the entire town is receiving the same water, it might be responsible for giving people the Sight. Dragon poison and dragon urine are both supposed to grant temporary Sight to humans, or permanent Sight if imbibed in large quantities - but that might kill you. You may have more allies than you first thought, Mister Hawkins.” 

“Dean,” Jim says, startled by his own realization, “he’s an adult, but he could just _see_ our gryphon like it was no big deal. But Rick’s just been drinking bottled water until the pipes could get fixed. But how could a dragon - “

“Mister Hawkins, I’d love to chat - tea, cake, the whole shebang - but we have very little time left,” she says, not unkindly. Jim glances at the leaf to see it barely a foot off the ground. “Goblins hunt in packs - no more than eight or ten at a time. More than that, and they’ll simply scatter. They can only hold together because Imhotep is leading them. Knock him out of the picture, and they’ll run.”

“I understand,” Jim says, “thank you.”

“Our time is up. Will you take a message for me?”

“Of course.”

The leaf brushes against the grass. “Mister Hawkins,” Amelia says, and holds her hand in front of her like she’s holding a child’s shoulders in front of her, “tell my son that I - “

Her voice is swept away in a great wind - leaves burst from every tree, swirling up and around her, blowing Jim back, and when he looks back, she is gone. The leaf rests on the ground.

Behind him, the trees release one another, parting before him like the red sea as he turns. He waits for a moment in the birdsong and the rustle of the branches, as though she might return, or as though one of the elves might reappear and offer him more time. But there is nothing but the soft sound of nature left to greet him.

And so he slips into the light of day.

~~

Jim sees Anya’s car when he pulls up, and thinks a very frank _’we’re so fucked’_ before walking into the house.

“ - And _what_ did you think you were doing, just _disappearing_ off into the night like that, were you _trying_ to guilt-trip me?” Anya hollers. Dimitri’s yelling too - apparently, neither of them is listening to the other, just screaming like they’re in the middle of Caveman Couple’s Therapy. “What, you been watching 13 Reasons Why or something and you think that’s a good _conflict resolution_ trick? Because - “

“Oh, I’m _sorry_ , are you upset because I tried to apologize because you got everything wrong, like you _always_ do?” Dimitri is shouting, “And anyway, I didn’t disappear because I was trying to upset _you_ , not _everything_ I do is about _you_ , does it occur to you that maybe I disappeared because - “

“ - It’s not! Also, that show is garbage! Do you think this is going to make me apologize for what I said before? Because it’s not. I’m still pissed off, and I - “

“ - Maybe something bad _actually happened to me?_ No, of course not! Because things only matter to you if you’re directly affected by - “

“ - Don’t ever want to see you again, O’Connell, now that I know you’re alive and not in a _ditch_ somewhere, and _why_ haven’t you called your aunts and told them that you’re okay and to call the search off, do you _know_ how worried everyone is - “

“Hey, Anya,” Jim says, shuffling past her through the kitchen and going directly for the fridge. Hogarth is sitting at the kitchen table, a blank piece of paper in front of him and an obviously fake, cheesy grin on his face. “Do we have any milk?”

“Jim! There you are,” she says, breaking from the argument at last but - apparently unaware of her own volume - still kind of yelling. “Are you okay? Why were you out?”

“I’d explain it, but there’s no way I could where you would actually believe me,” he says. He’s too tired to come up with a lie.

Anya blinks twice, then settles back on her heels and nods understandingly. “Oh. Fairy stuff?” She says. Jim spits.

“ _What?_ ”

“You know about fairy shit?”

“I’ve been hiding our master plan from you for _half an hour_ and I didn’t even _need_ to?” Hogarth shouts, flipping the paper back over.

“Um, duh,” Anya says, raising an eyebrow, “I mean, hello, I’ve _got_ the red hair. I’ve been beating off those little buggers for as long as I’ve been alive. Why do you _think_ I spend so much time fencing?” She shrugs. “Is that why you were acting all weird last night?”

“I got…kidnapped,” Dimitri says, glancing to his brothers for support. They shrug. “By…dwarves?”

Her nose wrinkles. “And you didn’t just fend them off?” She asks, disbelieving. “We had a fencing meet last night. You were _literally_ armed. With swords. Wow. Men really _are_ babies.”

“Hey! I only found out about this stuff like…a _month_ ago,” Dimitri sputters.

“Two months,” Hogarth adds.

“Hey, uh, hate to be _that guy,_ but our uncle is still super kidnapped,” Jim says, “can we _please_ get our shit together and not argue over whether or not we’re babies for getting our asses kicked by fairies? Also, _is_ there a plan?”

“Depends,” Dimitri says, pulling himself away from an intense stare-down with his not-girlfriend, “what’d the elves tell you?”

“Wait, what?” Anya says. For the first time in Jim’s recollection, she actually looks taken aback. “Elves? Elves are real? I thought that was just made up.”

“They mostly keep to themselves, I guess,” Jim says. “But I met Amelia - she said that we need to take Imhotep out. The rest of the goblins should scatter if we do. And that dragons…drink milk?” He raises the gallon jug at shoulder-height. “Also, it’s probably poisoning the water supply, but also giving people in the town the Sight, which is why Dean could see it. I don’t know how it could have gotten poison into the pipes, though.”

Hogarth stares down at his paper. “The great flood,” he says quietly.

“What?”

“The Great Flood,” he repeats, “the one the dwarves were talking about. A pipe…burst underground, deep in the caves underground, flooded the whole place. A dragon could have gotten in through there and started poisoning the water pretty recently, especially if its body makes acid or something. And that’s how Imhotep knew there was a dragon in the area, so he cleared out the dwarf caves or something to get in there and get it. That’s why he had them killed.”

The boys stare at the sink. In silence, Dimitri turns the faucet on and sticks his hand under the water.

“It’s running clean,” he says, “it doesn’t burn.”

“Okay, I have no idea what any of you are talking about,” Anya says, “but from what I can tell, and just what I know about you as people, I’m pretty sure you’re about to do something stupid, and it’d be irresponsible of me not to at least _help._ ” She looks down at Hogarth, and stares at the piece of paper labeled _PLAN_. “What’re we going to do?”

~~

“I just want to say it out loud,” Jim whispers to Dimitri, “I hate this plan.”

“Duly noted,” Dimitri whispers back, “now shush.”

“Both of you, pipe down,” Silver says from behind them, and gives Jim a particularly cursory (and, as far as he’s concerned, very unnecessary) prod with the dwarven sword, “yer _s’pposed_ to be actin’ like prisoners. So quit consortin’.”

Jim runs his fingers nervously over the loose knots of rope binding his wrists behind his back. Somewhere above them, Hogarth and Anya are on a gryphon that they can’t control, waiting to give a signal they might not be able to respond to. They’re also flying, and Anya’s got her grandmother’s sword which might stab either of them and kill them, and Hogarth might slip and fall off and break his neck and maybe die, and every possibility is making Jim’s anxiety rocket up and down his back. Not that anyone seemed bothered by _that._ He’d looked at this plan and said “ _ABSOLUTELY NOT,_ ” and still been outvoted three to one.

“Jes’ wonderin’, but are humans naturally slow - and, tae tell you the truth, I mean that in every way that word can possibly be taken - or are you two runts of yer respective litters? The little one seems smarter, an’ he’s about six years old.”

“Big talk coming from the bear cub with baby’s teeth and a brain the size of a walnut,” Jim grumbles, “how old are _you_ , twelve? Are you some kind of child-prodigy in asshole-school, or is that just as big as your species _gets?_ ”

“Hey, can everyone _shut up_ before I have to _show_ you how to use a sword?” Dimitri snaps, then goes quiet and still. Ahead of them, they can hear the crackle of a blazing fire - the trees by the side of the road are blackened and dead. Far, far above the landscape and hazy from the distance, there’s what looks like a grey mountainside, littered with random detritus from the junkyard.

Jim feels the point of the sword pressing into his back again, and he begins to trudge forward, trying not to trip over the rope in front of him where Dimitri’s hands are bound, just like his own. Behind them, Silver begins to chortle in that unknown language - though he can’t understand it, Jim catches the word ‘scroop’, which he thinks probably means prisoners, or ogre, or something important. He keeps on saying it, to any goblin that appears to question him.

The camp comes into sight - all around them, at their knees and pouring from seemingly every crevice and hole in the forest of garbage, goblins squabble and squawk, pointing and prodding and grabbing at their jeans. A fire blazes in the ring of a ripped tire - the corpse of a raccoon is skewered above it, its fur smoking in the blaze. The stench of burning rubber and rotting meat permeates the air and sinks into their skin like a haze of grease. Dead ahead, standing on a squashed coffee can, a tall, red-skinned goblin turns their way. Yellow, goatlike eyes wobble in tandem, squinting through grey cataracts up into their faces.

“Silver,” it cries, croaking in a language Jim does not know but somehow understands, “what is this? What have you brought me?”

“They’re _prisoners,_ you daft-brained buffoon,” Silver says, though he sounds less sure of himself than Jim has become accustomed to, “found ‘em lurkin’ around the Smollet state. Figured they were probably th’ culprits Imhotep was lookin’ for in th’ first place.”

The taller goblin gives a hissing sigh and rolls its eyes. “Very well,” it says, “tie them up against the skeleton-car. They will go to Imhotep when he is ready.”

“They _ought_ t’go to him _now,_ ” Silver grumbles, but he doesn’t push the argument. Jim glares down at him as he tugs them unkindly towards the metal frame of a car. 

“Shouldn’t you be arguing our case?” He whispers as Silver begins to loosely fasten the rope to one of the chairs.

“What d’you think I was doin’?” Silver whispers back. “Y’can’t just storm into the palace to see th’ king, you know. Y’need an _appointment._ ”

“We don’t have _time_ to wait around, you little - “

“Just _trust_ me,” Silver says, though he’s yet to prove himself trustworthy in the slightest, “wait for th’ right moment, and remember the signal. I’ll keep ‘em distracted until it’s time.”

With that, he makes the final pretense of tying the knot, turns on his heel, and walks back towards the ring of goblins at the fire. Jim glances over at Dimitri, who’s looking paler than usual and staring resolutely at the burning raccoon. 

“We’ll be okay,” he says, trying not to sound as uncertain as he feels, “we’re close to the palace. Rick’s only…what, a ten minute walk away? Once we get out of here, we’ll be there in no time.”

Dimitri says nothing, but where their arms are tied behind them, Jim feels his brother take his hand. 

All around them, the tall red goblin is barking at his troops, sending them off in one direction or another, and eventually disappearing himself. Maybe ten remain as the afternoon sky grows darker above them, some waiting at posts but most growing bored with their work and scuffling back and forth to the fire. Silver is making conversation with a few himself, their heads craned towards him in fascination.

By his estimate, an hour passes with no activity at all.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great plan,” Dimitri whispers, “we’re nowhere near dad, and I don’t know where Hogarth and Anya are. They should’ve been here by now.”

Jim feels his nerves creeping up his neck, and squeezes his brother’s hand to silence the doubts whispering in his ear. “We can’t change the plan now,” he says, and stares into the fire, desperately trying to think of something to distract them from the waiting. “Look, in the ashes,” he says after a moment, and juts his chin forward as if to point, “salamanders.”

Dimitri squints. “What, the lizard things? Why don’t they burn?”

“They’re supposed to…breathe fire, I think,” Jim says, “it won’t hurt them.” He glances down to see one crawling on the top of his sneaker, and smiles despite himself. Its scales are deep black and opalescent, shining in the crackling firelight with reds and oranges, like fire translucent through its skin.

“Quit talking,” one of the goblin barks, and scampers towards them. Jim raises an eyebrow - so these ones do speak some English, after all. “Stupid boys. Should just eat your crunchy skin.”

Another one, apparently growing bored of Silver’s talk, looks over its shoulder and turns tail, scampering on four legs to join its comrade. “Have to wait,” it hisses, “wait for the master. But could take little pieces. Make good cracklins out of its cheeks.” It puts a clawed paw on Jim’s leg, poking and scraping through the denim into his flesh. Another hand, sickly green, reaches towards his face. He flinches back, but says nothing.

“He wouldn’t notice,” agrees the first one, “if just some pieces was missing. Could take some bits.”

“Get _away_ from him,” Dimitri spits, and pulls his hand out of Jim’s. Only then does Jim realize how tightly he’d been holding it as his hand collapses into a fist. His shoulders shake.

“Maybe we oughta start with big one, then,” the second one says, focusing those white, fogged eyes on Dimitri, “more to go around. More to eat.”

“Eat _this,_ ” Dimitri snaps, pulls an arm loose from its false hold, and punches the creature in the face. “Silver! Throw the sword!”

Jim kicks the second goblin in the face and scrambles to his feet - just in time to see Silver throw the sword through the air to his cousin, and then bolt into the tree cover. “Coward!” He yells. “Where’s Hogarth?”

“I don’t know, but we’re changing the plan,” Dimitri yells, and swings his sword at a goblin that leaps a little too close, “where’s that dragon?”

“It’s wherever that smell is coming from,” Jim replies, and kicks a goblin square in the teeth as the beasts, yapping and barking, circle around them. He backs up until he feels Dimitri’s back against his.

This feels familiar.

“What smell? _Everything_ here smells,” Dimitri yells back, and swings the sword. The beasts hiss and stumble back, then approach again, more aggressive than before. With a cry of frustration, he jabs his sword forward, and strikes a goblin directly in the chest. It screams - its blood spills, red, over the dirt. He pulls his sword back, paling, eyes fixed on the corpse in a horrified revelation - 

Above them, something screams. Jim stares up, and sees, against the blistering orange glow of the sun, the shadow impression of a diving gryphon. “Hogarth,” he says, breathless and grinning, “Anya! They made it!”

If anything ever went well in Jim’s life, this would be the point where the plan turned around, where the world collectively tipped in their favor. The appearance of the gryphon would startle the goblins, frighten them away, and Anya’s expertise with a sword and her familiarity with the fae would turn the tide. But in the evenings late in his life, when Jim will lie awake in bed and wonder what could have been different if he had just kept a clear head, this is the moment he keeps returning to. The question he should have been asking is not “where is my brother?”, but rather “where is the dragon?”

The goblins scatter in every direction, save for the one impaled by Dimitri’s blade, and Jim guesses it’s due to the gryphon until he hears that warbling cry, low and barking as a jackal over old Zimbabwe. An ancient, ugly sound that rings through the very core of his humanity and strikes fear into the darkest corners of his heart. As he turns to see it, long and snakelike, red-black wings over two lean legs, perched on its throne of scrap, beak wide and wet tongue lolling, those piercing green eyes blast silence into his skull and reduce him to the thrum of his heartbeat.

The dragon leaps.

With a scream, Jim stumbles back, but those two wings beat once and its claws grab him by his shoulders, throwing him to the ground and spreading that maw wide enough to see the thousands of rows of needled teeth descending all the way down its throat, jaw loosened like a snake about to swallow his head whole. Desperately, he throws his arms up into its chest, forcing its body away from him - but it coils around him and he screams again in agony as the acid coating its body burns at the flesh of his palms. It won’t stop making that horrible noise, that yowling purr, driving him out of his mind and pushing all other sounds too far away to hear.

Someone above him yells his name, and the dragon pulls up and away from him, loosening its grip to bellow a thin spout of flame that stinks of petrol and carnage. Strong hands grab him under his armpits and drag him roughly away from the beast - as he’s pulled back, his vision flooded with the green of the monster’s eyes and his ears deafened to noise, he sees Anya, arms pulled back, sword in hand, swinging forward to strike off the monster’s godforsaken head.

“Don’t touch it,” he gasps, unable to hear the words leaving his own mouth, “its skin is poisonous - it’s covered in acid!”

Aided by the hands on him, Jim stumbles to his feet. Dimitri faces him, sheet-white, grabs his arm and pulls him away from the battle. The pain of being touched where the dragon had held him leaves him breathless.

“Come on,” Dimitri’s mouth says, “Hogarth’s over here with Giant. Can you walk on your own?”

_James Pleiades Hawkins._

Slowly, the world tries to shift back into his head - Jim can hear his brother’s concerned platitudes as though from a distance, like someone yelling through plate glass, and his vision clears, though there’s still a green fog that he cannot blink it away. “I’m okay,” he lies, and tries to straighten himself, “but Anya can’t kill that thing on her own - it’s too strong. She’ll be dead before a sword forged by mortal hands can strike it down.” He blinks and shakes his head. He can’t remember _thinking_ that - it’s as though something is using his mouth to speak through him.

“What?” Hogarth is staring up at him, eyes wet with fear and confusion. Jim tries to open his mouth to explain, but nothing comes out - instead, he looks at Giant, who in turn is staring down at something on the other side of a mound of trash. He stumbles along and peers over the side to see the carcass of a cow, lying on its side. At its udder is a mound of wriggling black snakes, fighting one another to bite at its teats. Baby dragons. He recoils in disgust.

“She is not an evil creature,” his voice says - he struggles against it, but _something_ is inside him, fighting back. “She is simply a mother, protecting her young. The most dangerous creature on earth is a mother whose children are in danger.”

_They deserve to know. They are too foolish to put it together themselves. So are you. So are you all._

“You must use the beast,” he says, as he struggles and screams to regain control in his own brain. His arm raises against his will, points to the gryphon, “he is the only one who would stand a chance against her hideous glory.”

“Jim?” Dimitri’s voice is still distant, while the dark condescension in his head speaks with absolute calm and clarity. “What’s happening? What are you saying?”

“The _gryphon,_ ” his voice cries in perfect unison with the one in his head, “if you do not pull the dragon away, the girl will die and her carcass be feasted upon by its brood! Save her! Sacrifice your beast!”

‘That’s not me,’ he screams against the cool waters of the tide, unable to loosen the alien grip on his voice, ‘I would never ask you that - I wouldn’t even think of that - ‘

_James Pleiades Hawkins._

“That’s not me,” he cries, and his body crumples down as he floods his body with himself, slamming his hands over his ears and falling to the ground, “I didn’t say that! It’s not me!”

Hogarth runs to him, understanding and throwing his arms around Jim’s hunched torso as he rambles every word he can think of, his brother shushing him with platitudes that he cannot comprehend. Next to them, Dimitri looks to the gryphon - and looks back over the way, towards Anya.

She’s flagging desperately - her sword can’t penetrate the dragon’s thick, scaly hide, and its teeth have caught her in ugly places, leaving long, thin scars of beading blood along her arms and shoulders. She struggles to keep up the attack, but the dragon twirls and slithers, fast through the air as a snake through grass or an eel through water. It dodges her most cunning jabs and whips its head back at her, striking small victories through her iron defense again and again. Her blade cannot protect her. Without help, she will surely perish.

“Hey!” Dimitri hollers, and hurls a piece of metal at the dragon’s head - it whips back, screams towards him - behind it, Anya jabs it with her sword and it swings back, slithers the full perimeter around her as she tries to make contact. As she occupies it, he runs forward towards the gryphon and leaps astride.

Hogarth is too late to understand what’s going on. “Dimitri, _no,_ ” he cries, breaks away from Jim and runs towards the gryphon, but Giant leaps over a pile of trash and beats its wings a single time, and is beyond reach. From the ground, the dragon’s head swings up, sees a true adversary in the sky, and with another howl, slithers straight up and follows it against the dying of the day.

“Hogarth, Dimitri,” Anya cries, running to them - then stops. “Jim? Where’s Dimitri?”

“It wasn’t me,” Jim says, desperate against the accusations in his own head, “I didn’t do it, it wasn’t me - “

“Oh my god,” Anya says, staring up into the sky and going pale, “he’s up there?”

Above them, the gryphon screams and claws as the dragon coils around his body like a constrictor, black blood pouring from between its scales where its beak snaps at its neck. But with his wings bound, Giant struggles to remain airborne, locked into the power of the dragon. And there, on his back, too distant to make out but too familiar to be mistaken, Dimitri swings the silver sword through the air and hacks uselessly at his opponent. On the ground, the three of them watch in abject horror.

“He’s going to die,” Hogarth says, “they’re both going to die.”

Jim watches, silently, as Hogarth walks to the cow’s form. His stomach churns. “Hogarth,” he whispers, too quietly for his brother to hear, “don’t - you can’t - “

It doesn’t matter.

Unable to do anything but watch, Jim watches. He watches as his brother - who always catches spiders in jars to take them outside, who makes casts for stray cats and solemnly buries tadpoles who don’t make it through the winter, who has never hurt an animal in his entire life - raises a foot up and crushes one of the baby dragons under his heel. It screams and crunches under his shoe, its blood burning acid into the rubber of his sole.

Hot tears begin to stream down his face as he raises his foot again and crushes another, twisting his shoe to smear it into the dirt. “Look!” He screams, choking on the tightness of his throat, “look what I’m doing to your babies!”

The dragon sees him and shrieks - her body pulls away from the gryphon and streaks directly down towards them - but Giant catches her with two strong talons, pulls her back, and rips her gizzard out with his beak. She writhes in agony in the air for a moment, then plummets, headfirst, into the ground with a cacophonous thud and lies still. The gryphon descends upon the remains.

Dimitri’s sword falls, and then so does he.

Anya runs to where his body lies still in a pile of newspapers, and for a moment, he looks dead - then, he groans and shifts slightly, and she props him up in her arms, speaking softly to him. Jim gets shakily to his feet and makes his way to Hogarth, who looks up at him, face wet with tears and snot, and begins to bawl, shaking and sobbing as Jim pulls him into his arms. He holds his brother for a long, long time.

They’re both still children. It isn’t fair.

With some assistance, Dimitri manages to get to his feet, and - leaning on Anya - limps over towards them. His arm is bent dangerously, and his shoulder is badly bruised from under his tee shirt, but he otherwise looks…alive. “I know, I know,” he’s grumbling, “all men are babies.”

“That’s not what I was going to say,” Anya says.

Dimitri sighs and leans more weight into her. “I know.”

“What do we do now?” Jim asks. The world is still stained green, and though his hearing has improved somewhat, the words and voices around him have a nebulous quality, indefinite and rounded by the edges, and he begins to wonder if it’ll ever go away. “We can’t retreat. But we can’t keep going, either. Where’s Doppler?”

“He’s still in Hogarth’s pocket,” Anya says confidently, and starts to tug her white camisole out from under her tank top. “Here, we can use this as a sling for your arm.”

“Thanks,” Dimitri says, “Here, your grandmother’s sword - you dropped it. It’s kind of a piece of crap, so I’d rather hang on to the dwarven one to use as a cane.”

“Don’t push your luck,” she says, and folds his arm for him. “We have to keep going. Right? That weird little hobgoblin took off, so we can’t retreat and return as his prisoners _again._ This is the last chance we’re going to get.” As she ties it around his neck, securing it in place, she quickly kisses his cheek. Jim pretends not to see.

Hogarth sniffs and pulls away from Jim’s shirt at last, composed enough to rub his face with his own shirt. His eyes are puffy and red, but he’s breathing evenly, and - unlike the other three - he hasn’t been injured. “We’re really close,” he says, “but we have to leave Giant here. He’s really hurt.”

In tandem, Jim and Dimitri turn to look at the gryphon, feasting happily on the green-black innards of the dragon. It looks fine to Jim, but he’s not the animal expert. “Yeah, okay,” he agrees, “Dimitri, are you okay? Can you come?”

“As long as this sling holds,” he says, and wriggles his arm against it experimentally. “You sure you know what you’re doing, Anya?”

“Sure I’m sure,” she says, and shrugs. “Come on. It’s a long walk up to the palace.”

~~

The building rises out of the ground like an overgrown stalagmite, lumpy and oddly angled, made out of rocks or concrete or stucco and surrounded by a veritable forest of broken glass and metal shards, some forged into points nearly ten feet tall. There’s no grass, and no birdsong, lending the whole procession a silent, unsettling air.

“The door’s just open,” Hogarth says, squeezing Jim’s hand tightly. He’s been holding it since they left the gryphon, and Jim’s not exactly going to shake him off. “And the drawbridge is down. Why does he even have that? There’s no water.”

“Not to be cynical, but this has _trap_ written all over it,” Doppler whispers from his new resting place down the back of Jim’s collar. “Stay alert - we must remain on the defense.”

Up ahead, Dimitri and Anya show no sign of overhearing them, but in the still air, they’ve gone silent, too. Around the perimeter of the palace, there’s a moat so deep that Jim can’t see the bottom - but he _can_ see the glimmer of glass and metal where it points up from the earth, ready to impale all who topple over the side. He swallows.

Anya steps on the drawbridge first, all trepidation - when no immediate booby-trap sets off, and the only noise is the gentle creak of driftwood under her sneakers, she glances back to the boys, then bolts across as fast as possible, unwilling to be controlled by her fear. With a glance and a shrug, Hogarth and Jim follow, with Dimitri directly behind.

No trap comes - no arrows or poison gas or giant rolling stones cross their path. The inside of the palace is exactly as silent as the outside, save for the echoes of their footsteps, which temper back to them from every surface of the vaulting, cavernous room. Directly in the center is a massive spiral staircase of wood and chain, and scattered around the edges are long wooden tables, littered with half-eaten food or crumpled piles of trash. As Jim walks further inside, he hears the quiet buzz of thousands of black flies.

Dimitri stops, cocks his head to the side. “Do you guys hear that?”

“What, the bugs?”

“No, there’s…it sounds like…” his brow furrows, and he squints up at the ceiling. “It’s like…quiet people,” he manages, tripping over his own words, “like…English. It sounds like they’re…like someone’s screaming.”

“Could be some kind of weird…ambiance noise machine,” Hogarth offers, more out of fear than anything else, “you know, maybe Imhotep has trouble sleeping, too.”

“Uh, I think it’s _that,_ ” Jim says, and points to a large, open mason jar full of honey on a nearby table. As he steps closer, he can see the tiny bodies of sprites, trapped inside, struggling against the slow pull downwards and shrieking, writhing. 

Hogarth pulls his hand free from Jim’s at last and sprints towards the jar, all sense of caution lost in the face of his enormous compassion - with careful fingers, he reaches in and begins to pull the sprites out, one by one. They wail and struggle as he pulls them free and sets them down on the table, their delicate wings tearing in their escape and their bodies weighed so heavily by the honey that they can scarcely stand, let alone think of flying away. One lies motionless on the wood, limp in Hogarth’s hand.

“Are there…any more in there?” Jim asks.

“I think so,” Hogarth replies, “at the bottom.”

They stare at the jar for a moment. “Come on,” Jim says quietly, and places a hand on his brother’s shoulder, “you did what you could. We need to go.”

“I’ll admit I’m with Jim on this one, lad,” Doppler chimes in from Jim’s shoulder, “our adversary awaits us upstairs. I have the feeling we’re expected.”

Jim stares at the staircase. If this were a video game, he thinks, this would be a save point before a big boss fight. It’s impossible to think of this in real-world terms - it’s all too huge and phantasmagoric to have any place in this reality.

Slowly, after the rest of the party, he begins to climb the stairs, gripping the railing tightly. “Doppler,” he whispers, “I think…I think if Imhotep is up there, we’re going to die. I don’t think we can fight him.”

“And yet, you choose to face him anyway,” Doppler replies, “because your love for your uncle triumphs over your fear of death. Fortune favors the bold, master Hawkins.”

He stares at the ground. “I just remembered,” he says quietly, “it’s my birthday today. I’m fifteen years old. I was sort of hoping for a better present than imminent death.” Ahead of him, Hogarth has taken Dimitri’s unresisting hand, and ahead of _them,_ Anya leads the charge, her grandmother’s sword pointed directly out like a lance. They’re all too far to hear him talking, which suits him just fine. “Doc, can I ask you something?”

“Certainly, dear boy,” Doppler says, but he sounds unsure. Too bad. “Ask away.”

“The last thing I said to my mom was that I wanted her to leave me alone.” He’s paraphrasing, sure, but Doppler gets the idea. Anyway, he doesn’t want to go into the details of their fight - he just doesn’t want his mother’s disappointment hanging over his grave. “If I don’t make it out of this, you have to tell her that I died honorably. And that I didn’t mean to let her down. And that - that it isn’t her fault.”

“Jim,” Doppler says hopelessly, “don’t talk like that - “

“ _Promise me,_ ” Jim says, more forcefully than he really intended, “promise you’ll reveal yourself if you have to. Please. I need this.”

There’s a pause. “I promise,” he says after a moment, and tugs lightly on a strand of Jim’s hair, “but don’t tell either of your brothers. This is a…birthday thing. It’s my gift to you. I’m not giving these out for free.”

Jim laughs despite himself. “Okay, okay,” he agrees, “it’ll be a secret.”

The stairs just keep going, onwards and upwards - by the time they reach the top, even Anya, who’s in arguably the best shape out of all of them, is out of breath and not beyond using her grandmother’s sword as more of a walking stick than a cane. Unlike the dwarven blade, though, it bends softly under her weight. Jim seems to recall her mentioning it belonged to her grandmother or something, but he hadn’t paid much attention to the conversation before. In retrospect, Anya’s grandmother is probably a pretty cool old lady.

“I don’t get it,” Dimitri gasps as they pause for breath at the top in another cavernous room, “we just made a ton of noise. Why hasn’t anyone come to attack us or something?”

“Well, this is, like…the most obvious trap in existence, right?” Jim says, “that, or I guess goblins could be in the town, terrorizing people. Amelia said the dragon-water might have given everyone in the area the Sight.”

“Mm. Yeah, no, I’m pretty sure it’s the first thing,” Dimitri says. “Let’s find dad and get the hell out of here.”

“At least we know where to look,” Jim says, and points - on one wall, there’s a large, dimly starlit window, and next to it is a huge door, apparently opening out onto some terrace. “And…a pretty good idea of where Imhotep is, too.”

Oh well. It’s not like any of them were planning on living forever, Jim thinks, and braces against the floor as Anya pulls the door open.

But there’s no swarm of goblins, no burst of violence or color, no black cloud of locusts or tsunami of sand. In fact, there’s nothing at all. “All clear,” Anya says, “I’ll hang back and guard the door. You guys go.” After a moment of trepidation, Dimitri steps through, and Jim follows.

At the edge of the terrace, looking out over the eighty foot drop down into the moat, their uncle’s unconscious body is fastened securely with rope, the bag no longer pulled down over his head. But Jim can barely look at him - _his_ eyes are pulled to a figure in the center of the room, which is making it difficult to breathe.

“Dad?”

Leeland Hawkins turns to face him, and for the first time in Jim’s memory, he smiles. “Jim,” he says, “Hogarth. I’ve never been so happy to see anyone in my entire life. Think you can help me get untied?” He motions at the chains wrapped around his chest, holding him in place.

Jim takes a step back, green fog filling his head. “What - why are you here?” He asks. “How did they find you?”

“Are you okay?” Hogarth asks, just as confused but more forgiving by half than anyone could be expected to be. “Jim, I’ll get dad. You help Dimitri with Rick.”

“I’m fine,” Leeland says, “your mother called me last night and asked me to come out here right away. She said she was worried about - but I guess, after this, I’ll have to take your side, Jim.” He laughs hollowly. “Have you kids been dealing with this stuff alone all this time?”

Jim stares down at the knot in his hands. He can’t look at his father - can’t bear to make eye contact with him. Of _course_ he was just coming down to take him away. Probably wanted to take advantage of mom, too. Or, worse, Annie. Or just get in between them and goad them into fighting - but somehow, he can’t hate him. “Just…since the beginning of the summer,” Jim admits, keeping his back turned, “when we found this stupid book.”

“A book?” He says it in that stupid tone of voice, too, that sycophantic repetition that used to make Jim feel humiliated and upset. Now, it just makes him angry. “What kind of book?”

“A field guide,” Hogarth says, before Jim can get any ideas about sassing him, “about fairies and stuff. And there’s this ogre - Imhotep - who wanted it, so he ransacked the house and kidnapped you and uncle Rick.”

“A field guide, huh? Like for birds?”

“Yeah, sort of,” Hogarth says, “he got it anyway. But Jim read it so many times he could probably make another copy. Right, Jim?”

Jim shrugs. “I guess,” he says, unwilling to turn around. He can’t watch his brother fawn and croon over their father the way Jim once did - can’t watch their father mock him and push him away for his overzealous compassion the way Jim once was. “But we don’t know where Imhotep is. He’s probably nearby. We need to get out of here, fast.”

“This is all very…exciting,” Leeland says, “a magical field guide, ogres, fairies - man, what _else_ has Maine got? Maybe my brother’s been holed up in the best place in the world, after all.” He laughs again, and Jim sighs, rubs at his eyes with his hand.

“Look,” he says, turning around at last, “I know it sounds ridiculous. I’ve been _living_ it and _I_ think it sounds ridiculous. But look around you. Don’t you have enough evidence? For once in your life, can’t you just _believe me?_ ”

The wind whistles in the trees far below them, rustling the trees in a susurrus audible even through Jim’s blasted hearing. “I do,” Leeland says quietly, “I do believe you, Jim.” He has the conscience to look chagrined, at the very least. Jim sighs.

“That’s all I wanted,” he says, and looks away over the forest. The world is going dark, and the junkyard is dotted with the small lights of faraway campfires. Goblin hordes, getting ready for battle.

“Look - I’m sorry,” says his father, “I know I haven’t been there for you. Either of you - any of you. But I want you boys to know that I do _love_ you. And I believe you. I get it. And I’ll never go away again.” The last ring of chain falls away by Hogarth’s handiwork, and newly freed, he opens his arms as though to hug all three of them. “You too, Dimitri,” he says, smiling, “before all this, you were like a son to me, too. I want to be a part of this family again.”

Hogarth falls into his father’s arms immediately - Dimitri, with some trepidation, steps forward and wraps a cautious arm around his uncle. Only Jim remains fixed in place, fists at his sides, glaring as his father looks at him expectantly.

“Come on, Jim,” he says, “this is reconciliation, isn’t it? This is what you _need._ It’s my gift to you - today, of all days. Your _birthday._ Don’t you want to forgive and forget?”

“Of course I want to,” Jim replies, “of course I want my dad back in my life. I miss him and I miss the way he used to make my mom laugh. And I wish he remembered my birthday, or mom’s favorite color, or that Hogarth’s the one who loves animals and I’m the fuckup who can’t stop making mistakes. Of _course_ I want that. But he can’t give it to me because he’s selfish and cowardly and cruel, and _you_ can’t give it to me because _you’re not him._ ”

As he looks into those familiar brown eyes, they change until they blaze yellow - his father’s figure contorts and ripples, scales and rot appearing along his arms as he grows, his hair twining above him into long, sharp antlers. Trapped in his arms, Hogarth screams - Dimitri kicks at him and drops the sword on the ground. The door to the inside slams shut, separating Anya from them.

“Jim, run!” Dimitri screams. “Grab dad and get out of here!”

“Oh, but there’s nowhere to _go,_ ” Imhotep says, smiling, “your friend? She’s finished. This world is almost finished. All I need to do is finish you.”

As if the situation couldn’t get any worse, Jim hears his uncle stirring at his side. “Jim?” Rick asks blearily, “where am I? What hap- oh, _shit!_ ”

“Put them down!” Jim yells helplessly, “let my brothers go!”

“And _what?_ Let you three run away and write another field guide? Give it to the elves or the dwarves or wherever you let your alliances lie?” Imhotep narrows his eyes, staring down and freezing Jim in his own abject terror. “This is my world, now, not yours. If you think there’s a chance of you escaping with your own lives, you haven’t looked around.”

“Let go of my son! Get away from my children!” Rick is staggering to his feet, sweating and pale and bruised around the head but roaring with fury - as he stumbles forward, Imhotep swings his arms out, dangling Dimitri over the edge of the precipice. Threatening to drop him. Jim squints.

“Quiet down, old man, your work is finished here.”

Rick pauses, then screams - not out of fear or pain, but apparently out of a desire to scream _offensively_ , as though being loud enough might constitute an attack. A lion’s roar in a human voice. His hand reaches for a gun that isn’t there.

“Wait,” Jim says, “I just don’t understand - you killed the dwarves. How will you build your world without them? I thought that was your whole plan.” Vanity. A vain creature - likes the sound of his own voice - keep him focused, he thinks. 

Imhotep smiles. “I never had any intention of forming any serious design on those dirty cave-dwelling mongrels,” he says. “My only intention in forming their acquaintance - “

“Doppler,” Jim whispers hoarsely out of the side of his mouth, “the chains.”

“ - Was to enter their caves and retrieve what spawn remained in the pipelines intersected by their hovel. As my army had already found the mother - “

“What do you mean?” Doppler whispers back.

“The _chains,_ ” Jim hisses desperately, “your…rope magic. My brothers’ legs - you know - the _chains._ ”

“Oh,” Doppler says, understanding dawning in his voice, “yes. Yes! You keep him talking.”

“Put my son _down,_ ” Rick cries, frozen in place by the terror of placing the boys in further peril but indignant at his forced inaction.

“ - It was simply a matter of extracting the eggs,” Imhotep continues, unfettered by the chatter from below him. “At first, I intended to put off my reign until they were fully grown, but thanks to your precious Field Guide - “ at this, he pulls the book from within his robes and holds it aloft. In his hands, even that giant tome looks small. “ - I was able to acquire the secrets of accelerated growth. Through the milk of cattle, no less.”

Slowly, surely, the chains from the floor - Imhotep’s false imprisonment, forgotten along with his trick - begin to rise up into the air, gently shifting and clinking, and move to wrap around Dimitri and Hogarth’s legs. Dimitri stops struggling for a moment as he feels it, and looks down to see Jim, staring back up at him, determination in his eyes. Hogarth either doesn’t notice or is an _amazing_ actor - he just keeps wriggling, chains or not.

“Now that I have procured a small fleet of cattle, I am confident in my dragons’ abilities. Within the month, the whole brood will be fully grown and loyal only to me, as hounds are loyal to mankind. They will rain their fire and poison upon the heads of man and raze their civilizations to ash on the ground.”

Jim can’t help himself - he speaks up. “We killed your dragon,” he snarls, “and we slaughtered her offspring. Hope that doesn’t throw a wrench in your _plan._ ”

Imhotep goes quiet for the first time in several minutes. He looks shocked - confused - furious. “You _what?_ ”

“She’s _dead._ We fed her to our gryphon.”

The ogre appears to consider this, and his eyes glance back and forth as though to try and ascertain the truth to this. “It doesn’t matter to _me,_ ” he says at last, “I’ll find another one. But I ought to punish you for slowing me down.” 

And with that, he drops the brothers over the side of the balcony and out of sight.

Dimitri and Hogarth’s screams are cut short after a moment - Rick’s goes on and on. Jim can’t tell whether the chains will hold. But he can act.

He grabs the sword out of Rick’s hands and runs forward, swinging back like a batter waiting for the pitch, only to see Imhotep smiling down at him. This is the kind of match the ogre wants - this is the kind of match he can win. If he strikes like this, he’ll be pitting his own strength against the beast’s, and no matter how he plays it, he’ll still lose.

As the ground between them shrinks, moments before the swing, Jim changes course and stabs - straight down into the ogre’s foot.

Imhotep screams in surprise and pain and rage, stumbling back to regain his footing, but Jim strikes again, this time for the knee, and he goes over the edge, falling fast towards his own moat. As he follows, trying to catch a glimpse of his trajectory, he sees his brothers, pale and shaken but very much alive, hanging by the ends of their respective coils. They call up weakly to him.

Below them, the ogre shapeshifts - from the giant, robed figure, into a tiny blackbird, spreading its wings and sailing away towards the goblin hordes, small lights on the horizon, campfires glowing in the dark. Jim watches him fly, a dark pit in his stomach. Any moment now, Imhotep will send up a signal in the dark, bringing his army with him. They’ll storm the palace - corner his family - slaughter them just as they slaughtered the dwarves.

The blackbird flies low over a tree, and a small hand shoots out and grabs it. It happens so fast that Jim almost doesn’t see it. The ogre certainly doesn’t have time to change forms again.

Silver bites off the blackbird’s head and crunches it. “Ah,” he sighs, “I miss a good blackbird pie.”

Jim can’t help it. He starts to laugh.

END OF CHAPTER FIVE.

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EPILOGUE

Jim, ever the obsessive when it comes to cleaning, keeps sweeping out of the corners of the study long after all the dust is gone. If he’s being honest with himself (and he often is, these days), he’s mostly just trying to give Arrow some privacy as he goes through the desk drawers, looking at his mother’s things. Hogarth, who has no such qualms, is sitting at their great-uncle’s feet, chewing on crumbling dry scones and making running commentary in a fake British accent about how much he’d enjoy some tea.

Everything about this would seem pretty normal, if it weren’t for Silver and Doppler playing checkers in the corner of the newly-refurbished study. Normally, Jim would bet on the house brownie for anything intellectual, but he’s pretty sure Silver’s cheating. From the scowl on his face, Doppler probably suspects it, too.

It’s been three weeks since the encounter with Imhotep. Three weeks of calm, complacent quiet. Sarah and Annie agreed to stay a little longer, calling in long-overdue vacation time to be where they needed to be the most, and Jim thinks they might not be going _back_ to work for a long time - he doesn’t want to think about the logistics of it, but Silver gave him a couple necklaces from his personal collection of stolen fairy goods as a “sorry I destroyed your house” present. He’s pretty sure he knows where Silver got them, but his mom doesn’t, and as long as she continues not to know, _she’s_ not the one doing anything immoral. Arguably, Jim isn’t, either, but he’s not going to push his luck on this one.

With Rick _and_ Dean on their side (well, _mostly_ Rick, the profligate skeptic and all-around know-it-all cynic on ‘supernatural mumbo jumbo’, as he likes to be officially called), as well as the dragon-piss faucet water, the boys hadn’t had any trouble convincing their mothers of the truth. From the bizarre wounds to the literal fucking gryphon slurping up dragon guts, there wasn’t much to deny. Sarah managed to scare the entire family one day by hitting a hobgoblin in the face with a cast-iron skillet when she made the connection between it and her son’s injuries. Silver’s fine, though more deferential around her than anyone else now.

When they’d first got home after the fight with Imhotep, and the long walk from the junkyard to the estate, all five members of the party had been so exhausted they’d more or less fallen asleep on whatever flat surface they reached the fastest - Anya and Dimitri on the couch, Rick under the kitchen counter, Hogarth and Jim on the carpeted floor - and hadn’t woken up except once, when their mothers had arrived home and Rick had gotten up to explain the situation to them. Dimitri and Anya had pulled themselves up into less compromising positions and stayed awake to lend credibility to Rick’s seemingly insane claim, but the two younger boys had slipped back into unconsciousness for several more hours.

When Jim finally awoke again, it was late that night, and Rick and Dimitri were speaking quietly in another room. His mother was doing her best to clean up the ruined kitchen, and when he approached her, she had hugged him tightly. “I’m so sorry,” she’d said.

Even though it made him feel like a baby, Jim had hugged her back for a long time.

Later that week, Rick had arranged for Arrow to come home from the hospital and stay in the old house. Jim had returned upstairs from a basement-cleaning project to find his great-uncle sitting comfortably at the kitchen table in a starched black suit, saying things like “why don’t you organize your fridge more carefully? Your vegetables will go bad,” and “if you don’t pick your jaw off the floor, boy, a rodent will come by and steal it from you.” Normally, Jim would’ve made some comment about bringing a cantankerous old coot into their house, but for Arrow, he’d let it slide.

Anyway, it isn’t his house. It’s Rick’s and Dimitri’s, both of whom have been supernaturally lucky in love these past few weeks. Dimitri went on a “not-date” with Anya last Friday, which doesn’t look so ‘not-date-y’ to Jim - he’s pretty sure he saw them making out in the back of Anya’s station wagon in the driveway, which is sort of the grossest thing he’s ever seen but also kind of cute. Anya refuses to call it romance, but she’s around the house a _lot_ these days, and she slings her arm over Dimitri’s shoulders nigh-constantly. Maybe saving a guy from a dragon with a sword makes girls more affectionate. Jim wouldn’t know.

Their uncle, on the other hand, has gone on an _actual_ date. Dean’s been very cool about the whole thing, and - unlike their cousin - doesn’t go red and embarrassed when he says things like “we went to get coffee” or “we’ll be here if you need us”. Rick is…getting there. Slowly but surely.

“Well, this is a cool little space,” his mom says as she steps through the hidden door in the linen closet with a pot of tea. She says it every time she comes into the study, but it makes Arrow smile, so no one makes a fuss about it. “Hogarth, your mom’s still downstairs, she’s working on some more scones. How’s that one?”

“It’s dry,” Hogarth says honestly, “so I guess perfect, if we’re talking about scones.”

Arrow ‘harrumph’s from above. “A _good_ scone should crumble in the mouth. Crumble! It’s a lost art, to be sure. My father used to bake the greatest scones in New England. We knew it and we were proud of it…”

His great-uncle keeps talking, but Jim stops listening. There’s a window in the study, a window he’s only ever seen closed before, and has never really known how to open. But it’s open, now, the August heat streaming through and a soft wind blowing across his sweating head. He tries to open his mouth to ask if someone else figured the latch out, but he can’t - he’s frozen in place, letting the soft air dance on his face.

_James Pleiades Hawkins._

_The time has come. Meet us tonight under the full moon._  
_Bring the book._

_James Pleiades Hawkins._

He steps forward and pulls the window shut.

The book is locked away, and has been since the night they brought it home - afraid of leaving it where anyone could find it, Jim had secured it in the iron-lined trunk at the foot of his bed, where it had stayed for three weeks solid. He hasn’t felt compelled to pull it out and read it in all that time, as he once had - the memories of the fear and pain it had brought down on all of them has kept him distant. He’s not sure if the three weeks of inactivity are because there are no more beasts on their tail, or just because whatever else lurks out there is unable to track the book through its iron prison. Whatever the reason, he’s kept his skepticism.

“Jim? You okay, hon?” His mom is blinking at him, concern shining through every feature. She’s been more concerned the past few days, after a few doctor’s appointments have revealed minor permanent hearing loss and colorblindness after the fight with the dragon. Jim took it in stride, but he can’t exactly ask his mother to do the same.

“I…yeah, I’m fine,” he lies, “I just…got word from the elves. They want the book.”

Hogarth scrambles to his feet, crumbs scattering down his shirt and onto the just-swept floor. Jim tries not to sigh. “When?” He asks. “Where?”

Jim shrugs. “The grove, probably. They didn’t say, exactly, except that it had to be sometime tonight, because it’s the full moon or…I dunno, something stupid like that.”

“You can’t _go,_ ” his mother says instinctively, “it’s not safe. They tried to _kidnap_ you.”

“Uh, not - not _exactly,_ ” Jim says. “Anyway, it’s not an issue of can or can’t. They - first of all, I promised them. And I want that dumb book out of this house, so I can stop being afraid of what might come for it, or being attacked or someone disappearing again.” He sighs, and takes the mug of tea his mother hands him. “Thanks - also, I’m pretty sure they can literally control my body and mind with magic,” he adds, “I mean, they kind of already did. Only once, but that was enough for me.”

His mom takes him by the shoulder. “Well, if you _have_ to go, I’m going with you,” she says, more calmly than the worry lines on her forehead should allow, “I’m not letting you go traipsing off on some life-threatening adventure alone. _Again._ ”

“Oh, can I come?”

Sarah sighs. “Ask your mother, Hogarth,” she replies.

“Aw, _man…_ ”

“I guess I’ll come too,” Silver says, yawning lazily, “never got to see one o’ those elven forests before. Figure I might’n as well take the only chance I’m ever gonna get when it passes by.”

“What he means is that _we’ll_ come,” Doppler corrects.

Arrow cracks his knuckles. “I hope it isn’t too much of a walk.”

~~

In the end, everyone comes. Annie won’t let her son go without her, and Rick won’t, either. Dean just wants some ‘goddamn closure’, as he describes it - after all, he _did_ host the gryphon at the scrapyard, and was the first adult to believe any of this shit was real at all. Anya’s there for moral support, and to sate her own curiosity. She can’t stop asking “elves are real?” On loop.

Dimitri is there at the end, as he has been since the beginning.

Apparently, the humans weren’t the only ones to bring a party - the grove is lit with dozens of sprites, whirling and glowing in the air, illuminating the elves, beautiful in their individuality. The dark lady stands in the center, a welcoming smile on her face. Remembering Doppler’s behavior, Jim bows, awkwardly, and his brothers follow suit.

“How honest and true you are, to have returned and to have kept your promise,” she says, smiling. Apparently, all previous dishonesty has been forgotten in the wake of the book. “And you have brought the field guide? How good. We all must abide by our promises.”

Jim pulls the field guide from his backpack and - after only a momentary pause, staring at its cover, feeling it whispering soft promises to him as it once did - offers it to the dark lady. She reaches towards it - then, suddenly, flinches away, her hand retreating like she had burned it. Jim swallows. “Here,” he says, “take it.”

“You are truly willing to give it up,” she says, “and because you are…I cannot take it. You must keep it and protect the knowledge within.”

“I’m sorry, what’s…happening?” Jim asks, looking between the elves’ faces. Is this some kind of test? If it is, he’s not biting. “Look, I don’t care about it, okay? Just take it. I don’t want it - _we_ don’t want it.”

“ _Exactly,_ ” the dark lady says, and smiles. “You humans have seen the destruction this book could cause, and yet you resist its charms and wiles. Its safest home is in your hands. If the elves were to have it, we would swiftly forget the loss it caused. There are even _some_ among us who would wield it as a weapon.” She looks meaningfully across the grove, and Jim gets the sudden suspicion that there’s more going on here than he knows - than he’ll _ever_ know. “Your honor in keeping your word and valor in battle, your bravery, hard work, and dedication…these things have convinced us. You have shown us that humans _can_ be trusted with this knowledge. Maybe even more so than our own.”

Jim looks from one face to another. “Is this a trick? This feels like a trick.”

She laughs, round and warm. “Enough of this,” she says after a moment, peals of laughter still pressing through her perfect teeth, “you have completed your half of the trade! In exchange, I once promised you a handsome reward - the three of you may now request one.”

Silver pushes between their legs up to the front. “What, jus’ them?” He asks, sounding affronted. Jim rolls his eyes - he should have known better than to think Silver was just coming for moral support. “You know, _I_ should be gettin’ somethin’, on account of having been th’ one to slay the beast at all. I’d like a medal. A big one, made o’ gold. An’ it should say ‘Silver, slayer of ogres’. Or - no, ‘fearsome killer of monsters’. Or - “

Hogarth tugs on Jim’s sleeve to make him lean down. “It should say ‘supreme beetlehead’,” he whispers in his ear. Jim snorts unattractively.

“Perhaps we can have such a thing forged in time,” the dark lady says, holding a delicate hand in front of her mouth to hide her smile, “and - yes, I see it on your face - perhaps we might hold a feast as well, in due time. But first, I wish to know of these cousins - what do you desire?”

“Cousins?” Dimitri slings an arm over Jim’s shoulder. “Hell, no. We’re _brothers._ ”

“God, that is _the_ dumbest thing you’ve said today,” Jim says, but he smiles anyway and ruffles Hogarth’s hair with a hand. His younger brother makes a showy retching noise in response. “I think…all due respect, but I think we just want our great-aunt back,” he says after a moment.

“I have anticipated your request,” she says, smiling, “but I must remind you that when Amelia steps out of the grounds of our grove - when she leaves Faerie - all her years will come back to her at once. She will become as dust in the wind. Are you sure this is what you want?”

Jim looks back at Arrow, leaning on his cane. It’s not fair, he thinks. He was just a child, and it isn’t fair.

“Yes,” he says, “we’re sure.”

She nods, and snaps her fingers - and out of the trees, astride Giant, steps Amelia, looking exactly as she had before. She peers down at the boys from on high.

“You are…my other great-great-nephews, aren’t you?” She says quietly, though with that same dignified click shaping her words. “Jim didn’t mention he had brothers.” Her eyes, Jim realizes, are as sharp and kind as her son’s - she looks familiar, as she never has in pictures before.

“I’m Dimitri, and that’s Hogarth,” says Dimitri, “and those are our parents, and my girlfriend, and, um…some assorted fairies, and…” he trails off as he looks at Arrow. Their great-uncle doesn’t look ready to speak up just yet. When Jim glances back, his family is a pointillism masterpiece of different levels of confusion. From Anya, who looks excitedly dizzy, to Rick, who’s gazing around in abject terror, to his moms, who just look like they woke up halfway through Inception and are too embarrassed to ask what’s going on. Even Dean, who wore sunglasses to the grove specifically to avoid looking like ‘a slackjawed idiot’ - his words - kind of has his mouth hanging open.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, I’m sure,” she says, and grins widely - and for the first time, looks entirely unlike her photographs or self-portraits. She doesn’t look stuffy and old. She looks, Jim realizes, like his mother. “I see you have inherited my sense of curiosity. At least you have _also_ inherited a knack for getting yourselves out of trouble - never something I had anything to do with. And make no mistake, if you remain thoughtful and present, you will get yourselves into a great _deal_ of trouble over the years. But, I hope, always able to get back out of it.”

“We’re glad to see you too, aunt Amelia,” he says, “we brought your field guide back.” He hands her the book, and watches as her face lights up, brain clicking and whirling behind her eyes.

“My field guide! My magnum opus - and look at this! Who drew these?” She flips through the book, smiling.

“I did,” he says quietly, looking at the grass, “I know they’re not very good.”

“Oh, tish-tosh,” she says, “they are quite excellent. You are beginning your work, but you have quite a natural talent - I predict a future as a great artist, perhaps even as a cryptozoological naturalist, like myself. Is this the dragon? Fascinating. And is this - “ she breaks off, looking up, and Jim follows her gaze to where his great-uncle Arrow is standing.

He must look so old to her, he realizes. He’s older than she’ll ever get to be. As he walks towards her, leaning heavily on his cane, Jim quietly takes the field guide back and steps away. He tries to understand - tries to imagine what it would be like to see his mother looking exactly the way she does tonight after he’s grown old and withered - but he can’t. Just thinking about it makes it hard to breathe.

“You look just the way you did the day you left,” Arrow says, in that low, rumbling voice - and, as Amelia makes a move to dismount, “you can’t. If you touch the ground, you’ll die.”

“Arrow, I’m so sorry,” Amelia says, “I didn’t mean to leave. I shouldn’t have gone, and I shouldn’t have left you alone. I always loved you - and I always wanted to come home.”

“You are home. We can go home.”

“I can’t - I’ve been here too long. The elves have kept me alive for so much longer than I was ever supposed to be. But I have seen you again - alive, and well, and as handsome as your father - and I can go now. I’m ready.”

“I just got you back. I can’t lose you again,” Arrow says, but Amelia leans down and says something to him, low and soft. And she steps off the back of the gryphon and into her son’s embrace.

The dust floats away in the wind.

Arrow turns to look back at his family, and Jim expects to see tears streaming down his face, but his eyes are dry. He smiles and takes Hogarth’s hand. “Let’s go home.”

They walk out of the grove in silence, the elves slipping away into the trees all around them until they’re back in the field of tall grass. Jim feels his mother loop her arm around his back and squeeze his shoulder. And he realizes he isn’t sad - he isn’t even tired. All around him, the soft chatter of his family begins to sprout up. Dimitri and Anya arguing about their next fencing meet, or his uncle’s boyfriend offering to make coffee if they stop by. His mom’s girlfriend asking Arrow if he’d like to come visit them in Rockwell this autumn.

All around him, soft declarations of love in unexpected ways, little kindnesses he never would have heard before. He isn’t alone - his family is with him. Amelia is with him, too, in her books and in his pen. Nothing can tear this apart. Fairies couldn’t, fights won’t, fear can’t. Every one of them is too strong for that invisible world, and every one of them is home.

He’s got work to do.

FIN.


End file.
